EDITORS JAMES H. COX, University of Texas at Austin DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE, University of Toronto

Published by the University of Nebraska Press

{ii}

The editors thank the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto and the
College of Liberal Arts and the Department of English at
the University of Texas for their financial support.

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL ISSN 0730-3238)
is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American
Indian literatures. SAIL is published quarterly by the University of Nebraska Press
for the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures
(ASAIL). Subscription rates are $38 for individuals and $95 for institutions. Single issues are
available for $22. For subscriptions outside the United
States, please add $30. Canadian subscribers please add appropriate GST or HST. Residents of
Nebraska, please add the appropriate Nebraska sales
tax. To subscribe, please contact the University of Nebraska Press. Payment must accompany
order. Make checks payable to the University of
Nebraska Press and mail to

The editorial board of SAIL invites the submission of scholarly manuscripts
focused on all aspects of American Indian literatures as well as the
submission of poetry and short fiction, bibliographical essays, review essays, and interviews. We
define "literatures" broadly to include all written,
spoken, and visual texts created by Native peoples.
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the most
recent edition {iii} of the MLA Style
Manual. SAIL only accepts electronic
submissions. Please submit your manuscript by e-mail as an attachment (preferably in Rich Text
Format [RTF]). SAIL observes a "blind reading" policy, so
please do not include an author name on the title, first page, or anywhere else in the article. Do
include
your contact information, such as address, phone number, and e-mail address, with your
submission. All submissions are read by outside reviewers.
Submissions should be sent directly to Daniel Heath Justice at

sail@chass.utoronto.ca

Rights to the articles are held by the individual contributors.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Anthropological
Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Bibliography of
Native
North Americans, Current Abstracts, Current Contents/Arts &
Humanities, ERIC Databases, IBR: International Bibliography of
Book Reviews, IBZ:
International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, MLA International
Bibliography, and TOC Premier.

Lisa Brooks. The Common Pot: The Recovery of
Native Space in the NortheastMARGO LUKENS

100

Contributor Biographies

102

Major Tribal Nations and Bands

{vii}

FROM THE
EDITORS

A couple of years ago Daniel had the opportunity to visit with an extraordinary scholar from
Australia who was working hard to make a space in her
English department for Indigenous literature and looking to other English and Indigenous studies
programs in the British Commonwealth, including
Canada, for guidance. This scholar's struggle was supported by local community members and
many of her colleagues but made quite difficult by some
people in the administrative levels of her institution, whose responses ranged from apathetic to
hostile. The most memorable comment came from an
administrator who very comfortably insisted that "Aborigines won't have a real literature until
they have a Shakespeare."
While this statement might be more overtly obnoxious in its
smug stupidity than we might prefer, the sentiments are not that unusual. How many of
us who do work in this field, when we tell a new acquaintance what it is we study, are met with
some variation of the questions "Really? I didn't know
that they had a literature?" or "So you're talking about their myths and legends,
right?" Sometimes those conversations end in the interlocutor learning
something as we launch into a passionate affirmation of the rich and varied archive of Indigenous
literary expression; sometimes, perhaps, we just sigh,
shoulders drooping, and wonder how it is that, in the twenty-first century, there is still so much
ignorance (sometimes willful, most often not) about
Native peoples' literature and artistry.
Part of our mandate at SAIL is to increase
scholarly and public recognition of and engagement with Indigenous literatures,
pri-{viii}marily of the
United States and Canada but increasingly worldwide. While some essays are more theoretically
dense than others, all are expected to be accessible to
a broad readership, with invitational prose that challenges but never condescends to its readers.
As a result, every issue is something that can be shared
with astute readers, be they working in English departments, laboratories, restaurants, buses,
ranches. . . . Anywhere there are readers, that is where
SAIL belongs. Every issue offers testimony of the richness, the depth, and the
complexity of Indigenous literary expression, and every issue offers a
rebuttal to the idea that there is no Indigenous literature.
This issue is a perfect case in point. It begins with three
critical essays that take up specific creative texts by three diverse Native writers. Melody
Graulich's study of Louis Owens's The Sharpest Sight examines how the novel
"unearths" Chumash presence and challenges the rhetorics of erasure
that have mythologized the supposed vanishing of the Chumash people, thus opening up a
heretofore underexamined aspect of a novel typically read
for its Choctaw content. From there, we move to Steven Salaita's provocative study of Sherman
Alexie's post-9/11 works Flight and Ten Little
Indians, where he asks difficult questions about Alexie's representation of Muslim
characters, the legacies of U.S. colonial violence, and the
problematic and recurring specter of terrorism in these works. Rounding out the critical essays is
Dave Yost's study of the "textual war" at the heart of
David Treuer's The Translation of Dr. Apelles and the ways in which Treuer's
narrative offers a significant challenge to culturalist readings of Native
literature, as well as reader expectations of what that literature should or even can be.
As is something of a tradition in SAIL, the
critical essays are joined by other works that offer a transnational snapshot of Indigenous writing.
First,
Sámi writer and editor Kirsti Paltto provides an important assessment of the history and
current state of Sámi literature and publishing--a vibrant body
of work deserving of far more attention by scholars in our field. The issue concludes with our
regular book review section, led by Robert Dale Parker's
remarkable review essay of Salt Publishing's Earthworks series and its sharing of Indigenous
poetry with a global audience. {ix}
Together, the contributions to this issue articulate a sophisticated
understanding of the depth, the range, and the diversity of Indigenous literature.
So read it, and then share it. When somebody says, "I didn't know there was such a thing as
Indigenous literature," give them this issue, or direct them
to our past issues. Tell them of our thirty-plus years of scholarship in the field. Share with them
the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers
as well as the current ones.
And remind them that we do not need a
Shakespeare to have a literature, as we have something more than just a historical literary
tradition: we
have a living literature, and that deserves more than celebration--it deserves
respect.

James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice

{x}

{full page ad}

{1}

Unearthing the
ChumashPresence in The Sharpest
Sight

MELODY GRAULICH

The world was like that, full of hidden, half-forgotten things. Louis Owens, The Sharpest
Sight

He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. Leslie Marmon Silko,
Ceremony

"Tangled, mixed, interrelated." In these three words police deputy Mundo Morales succinctly
sums up Louis Owens's representation of the racial
history of California. "Indians, Mexicans, gringos, mixed-bloods" are all "caught up" in the story
of migration, dispossession, erasure, and survivance
that is The Sharpest Sight (197). Throughout the novel Mundo ponders his family's
role in this colonial story, knowing that the "Morales[es] used to
own all this place, . . . given it by a Spanish king" but recognizing that his family is not an
innocent victim of the "gringos," that their dispossession is
part of a larger pattern:

And it belonged to the Indians and we sold it for a quart of whiskey, Mundo
thought. That's all it had taken Dan Nemi's grandfather to get his
cattle onto the grant and begin the takeover that, in only ten years, would make him sole owner of
all the Morales land. Back when it was illegal
for a Mexican or an Indian to testify against a white person in court. (42-43)

{2} While Owens's second California novel,
Bone Game, exposes the history of the Ohlone, who lived, and live, on the northern
coast of Monterey
Bay, The Sharpest Sight is set in the coastal foothills at the southern end of the
Salinas Valley, Owens's childhood home, which, as Hoey McCurtain
points out, "all used to be Chumash country, you know. Everything you see. And now there ain't
no Chumash here at all, and we're here. . . . Us
Indians are a mixed-up bunch. It's like somebody took a big stick and stirred us all up" (19).
Attention has been paid to the Choctaw mythology and
history in the novel; to Owens's satirical references to canonical writers; to his use of
"blended mythologies" (Dwyer 43); to his style, which "conjoins indigenous and alien cultural
materials" (Taylor 221); but no one has explored how
Owens, attentive to the interplay between land, local Indigenous identities, and intersecting tribal
histories, crafts the novel on remnants of Chumash
culture through nature symbolism and landscape descriptions that reference Chumash stories and
through the Chumash material objects Cole and his
brother dig up.1 The Chumash also surface in the (erased) genealogy of one of the
novel's main characters. Mundo knew he "was part [generically]
Indian, though no one in the family had ever liked to admit it. Pure Castillian, they had always
pretended" (197). Not until the novel's end does he find
out that he is descended from the Chumash. Hoey turns out to be wrong that "there ain't no
Chumash here at all" as Owens subtly counters the age-old
story of the "vanished" Indians.
In this novel so self-consciously about "design" and
interrelationships, Owens drops brief references to the Chumash into the landscape of the text
for the reader to unearth. An early passage establishes the model for the reader.

[Cole McCurtain] would think about the people who had made [the
arrowheads and stone figure], trying to imagine their lives in the coastal
hills. Chumash, a people who seemed to have vanished into the pale hills the way the river
disappeared into the sand. He'd heard that there were
a few of them left somewhere, but he'd never seen one of them. And then he and Attis, who were
Indians too, sort of, came to dig up what those
vanished people had made. It was funny. He would {3}
try to understand the convergence, what strange design could have brought Choctaw
blood so far from Mississippi to find these Chumash things. (53-54)

Cole's brother, Attis (both, at this point in the novel,"sort of " Indians), found the arrowheads
and the "white stone doll . . . as crudely formed as the
arrowheads were fine, its face and limbs merely suggested by the carver" while digging a cave
behind their house (53). (In the twentieth century,
archeologists and adventurers removed many Chumash carvings from caves, which also
contained rock paintings.) Having lost Attis, "the brother he'd
known . . . better than he'd known himself," to the Vietnam War, Cole cherishes the memory of
that day, of all of his times with Attis in the California
foothills (22). In tribute to those feelings, uncertain about the rituals of his ancestors, he places
the arrowheads and doll in a leather bag Attis made,
which he carries with him or wears around his neck. His Choctaw uncle Luther later refers to it
as "a medicine" and reminds him to wear it (116). (I
will return to Owens's representation of Attis as a transmitter of the Chumash.) Like Cole,
readers are asked to dig into the Chumash past and attempt
to understand the convergences between various characters, natural forces, and the
Chumash.
This passage about the Chumash, like many others in the
novel, is autobiographical, generated from Owens's deep and abiding connection to the
California foothills. The incident was so significant to him that he returned to the story again and
again. Describing one of his childhood homes in the
Santa Lucia Mountains, he writes,

That was a secure and private world, where my older brother, Gene, looked
up at me from deep in the cave we were digging and said, "Look at
these Indian things," and we sat together in the sun to study two lovely arrow points and a tiny
white stone doll dug from six feet down in the
shaley earth. What were those Indians, I wondered. . . . Why had they set such things so carefully
in the earth, and where were those people
now? ("Motion" 175)

We naively collected the beautiful items, taking the doll to our mother as a
gift. We thought it strange and disappointing that {4} she
"lost" the
little carving almost immediately, and it was not until years later that I realized she had
respectfully returned the figure to the soil from which it
had come. ("Mapping" 207)

Owens's retrospective understanding of his mother's actions offers a fitting end to the story,
for "not until years later" would he attempt to find out the
answers to his boyhood questions about the "Indian things" and "where were those people now."
He must have been tempted to put this touching
concluding detail into his novel, but he chose not to. Instead, Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish Cole (and
other characters) wear the items of Chumash material
culture, thereby creating a physical connection, a "convergence," with the Chumash even though
Cole does not know enough about them to
understand why the material expressions of their worldview should protect him.
Owens presents no clear answer to this question but implies
that Cole's journey to recover his cultural identity originates in his sense of feeling
"indigenous to the place" that is the Chumash homeland. The phrase belongs to Potawatomi
Robin Wall Kimmerer, who points out, "Traditional
knowledge is rooted in intimacy with a local landscape where the land itself is the teacher" (101).
Cole has been well taught by the land, but he is
ignorant of the Chumash lived presence on it, where, Owens suggests in a cross-Indigenous
move, his traditional knowledge must originate. His desire
to understand "why they had set such things so carefully in the earth," a metaphor for their efforts
to preserve their history, is a desire to understand
their cultural identity, rooted in the land.
Owens's focus on mixed-blood and cross-tribal
convergences such as this one has been controversial among some Native writers, but recently
Sean
Kicummah Teuton has pointed out that "in situating Indigenous literature within narrative
histories that intersect, scholars expand and empower Native
Studies" (xv). Owens's exploration of Cole's connection to the Chumash through their land,
stories, and material culture allows him to excavate a
seemingly vanished tribe in The Sharpest Sight.
The Chumash people and their culture were decimated by
the Spanish conquest of the California coast and by the mission system, {5} but a large
portion of their oral tradition lives on, preserved in part by John P. Harrington, who spent
decades working with six Chu-mash informants to record
their stories. As Robert O. Gibson notes, "The project eventually produced several thousand
pages of notes that today stand as a testimony to the rich
religious and cultural traditions of the Chumash Indians" (32). These stories offer insight into
recurrent image patterns in the novel--the oak trees, the
flooding Salinas River, the bridges, Cole's leather medicine bag. I have no direct evidence that
Owens read these stories, but anyone familiar with his
work knows how widely he studied North American Indians and Indigenous California history
and about his meticulous research. Unearthing the
submerged Chumash stories in The Sharpest Sight helps readers understand what
was lost or destroyed in California's colonial past, a history still
"buried" today. As Owens says,

I guess one thing I'm working on in most of my writing is the way America
has tried, and continues to try, to bury the past, pretending that once
it's over we no longer need to think about it. We live in a world full of buried things, many of
them very painful and often horrific, like passing
out smallpox-infested blankets to Indians or worse, and until we acknowledge and come to terms
with the past we'll keep believing in a
dangerous and deadly kind of innocence, and we'll keep thinking we can just move on and leave
it all behind. (qtd. in Purdy 11-12)

Owens's young protagonists possess that "deadly kind of innocence" until they explore the
past--and indeed, so did the boy Owens and his brother
Gene. And yet like Owens and his alter-ego, Cole, we can also find sustenance and a sense of
connection to what we dig up out of the past. I contend
that Owens, who claims "silence a people's stories and you erase a culture," seeks to find a way to
let the Chu-mash influence the "tangled, mixed,
interrelated" identities of contemporary Californians ("Mapping" 211).
Owens uses Chumash references to implicate the young
protagonists of the novel in his design. In an early comic passage, Hoey and Cole discuss
the "Indian stuff " Cole learned in Boy Scouts, including "how to mash up acorns and make
flour." When Hoey asks, "How'd {6} that acorn stuff
taste?," Cole responds, "Like shit" (55). One of the few things California schoolchildren of
Owens's generation were taught about the state's original
inhabitants was that acorns were a major food source. Exactly Owens's age, I made and ate
"acorn mush" in fourth grade in the foothills of the Salinas
Valley, where the Chumash lived; the mush tasted so bitter because our teachers did not
understand that it needed to cure to get rid of the tannic acid.
Acorns appear frequently in Chumash mythology, where what appears to be food is sometimes
really feces, a detail that perhaps provokes Cole's
comment (see Blackburn 85).
In The Sharpest Sight, acorns are linked to the
disturbed young heroine, Diana Nemi, who believes that by murdering Attis, she is taking
revenge
for her sister Jenna's death (she was killed by Attis in a psychotic break) and, perhaps, framing
her father. Inheritors of what Owens calls "the systemic
land theft [in California] that had made a few white men rich," the Nemi girls fall from grace for
the sins of their fathers (101). Owens extends the
Christian imagery by representing Diana as a rebellious Eve: her emerging womanhood and
sexuality, once innocent and natural, have become
perverted (perhaps the acorns are her apple), and she persistently--and rightly--blames her father.
A hunter, associated with the moon, darkness, and
endings, a grove of trees, and a watery pool, she also seems kin to the Roman goddess Diana, as
critics such as Chris LaLonde have pointed out.
Owens offers readers guidance in understanding characters such as Diana.

[C]ontemporary Native American authors are requiring that readers cross
over the conceptual horizon into an Indian world. In addition to
Roman and Greek mythology, today it helps a great deal if a reader knows Choctaw, Chippewa,
Navajo, or Blackfoot mythologies in order to
read Native American works. . . . To cite an example with which I am intimately familiar, a
reader should know something about both European
and Choctaw mythologies and cultures to understand what to make of a mixedblood character
significantly named Attis McCurtain who, while
spinning in a black river, encounters tribal bone pickers in my second novel, The
Sharp-{7}est Sight. In a
multicultural world both the name
Attis and the traditional bone pickers have significance. If we miss one, we miss the whole.
("Beads and Buckskin" 20)

In the Greek mythology Owens expects his readers should know, Attis is a god of vegetation
and a sacrificial victim whose death and resurrection near
the vernal equinox bring about the renewal of fertility to the earth. His effigy is hung in a huge
pine tree, a convergence with Choctaw mythology,
where the dead body is put to rest on a scaffold of trees, where it remains until most of the flesh
is gone. Near the close of The Sharpest Sight, in the
springtime, Cole finds Attis's body deposited by the flooding Salinas River, "cupped . . . as if he
had been placed there with loving precision," in the
arms of "four small oaks," trees prevalent in the California foothills and significant in Chumash
mythology (251-52). The river has already stripped the
bones of much of the flesh, but, like the Choctaw bone pickers, Cole is necessary to bring Attis's
journey to completion, cleaning the bones and taking
them to Mississippi to his Choctaw relatives. (The Greek meaning of Cole is "victory of the
people.") Only then can spring lengthen and the riverbed
become again a rich source of life in chapters 53 and 54 (259-61).
To readers familiar with Chumash mythology, Diana, like
Attis, is an ironic figure, a murderer, an anti-fertility goddess. In connection to Diana, one
of the primary symbols of the life cycle for the Chumash, the acorns, offspring and seeds of the
oak, become associated with death and destruction.
The Chumash "viewed" the moon to be a single woman, a "cleansing agent over all that was
considered 'dirty,' . . . [who] affected all other earthly
creatures, even the oak," and Diana appears to be a negative manifestation of her (Hudson and
Underhay 75). The "sacred grove" of Owens's
life-denying Diana is made up of the oaks that surround her home, a site of repeated
dispossession, once belonging to the Moraleses and before that
the homeland of the Chumash. When Diana visits her sister's grave, "beneath a live oak," she
counteracts the life-resurrecting forces of spring: "In the
early summer Diana had gone there to pluck the sprouted acorns from the grave, hating the little
curling {8} roots that split each shell and twisted into
the earth like the tails of pigs" (190). Later in the novel she steals Cole's life-sustaining medicine
bag, which connects him to the land and to the power
of the Chumash culture.
Death also calls to her from "an ancient white oak" in
Diana's grove when she hears a "great horned owl" and imagines herself soaring with the owl
along the river where Attis's body floats (149). She becomes the voice of death, the role played
by owls in Choctaw mythology: as Owens writes, "we
feared the owls that brought warnings of death. To hear the owl was to know death was near"
("Shared Blood" 197). Yet looked at from a
cross-Indigenous perspective, Diana's association with owls suggests the duality of her role in the
novel. For the Chumash, "[t]he Owl represents
clarity of mind and spirit, and wisdom" (Waiya, par. 14) and is often the "personal spirit guide"
or "dream helper" of shamans and doctors (Timbrook
and Johnson). According to pharmacologist James Adams, who recorded and sang a version of
the Chumash owl song, "Yamaqueeday," used in
healing ceremonies, "The owl song is the song of the 'Antap,' the [shaman] healers. The owl
protects us as it flies at night with its keen vision and
keeps danger away. Traditionally, many 'Antap' had owl feathers on their clothing or in their
hair."2
As Mundo's Viejo says, Diana is "not entirely wrong" in the
actions she takes (223). Attis's murder of Jenna was the act of a madman, his spirit
destroyed by Vietnam, and Diana's murder of him allows him to enact the myth of sacrifice and
resurrection that will bring the universe back into
balance, to heal. The healing capacity of the owl plays another role in her story as well. Diana, in
her "deadly innocence," becomes a victim of violence
at the hands of Jessup, the character dedicated to the dark designs at work in the universe,
allowing Hoey, waiting outside her house to murder her
father, to display his "clarity of mind and spirit, and wisdom." Instead of resorting to murder,
Hoey becomes a healer, building a sweat lodge (used by
both Choctaw and Chumash) to heal the girl who killed his son. Significantly, he encourages her
to "let go of the things that prevent you from
breathing" (242), a key practice of Chumash healing (Adams and Garcia, par. 13). Afterward,
sitting with his back against {9} an "oak tree," he hears
"in the branches of the tree a great horned owl beg[i]n to call in a deep, cautious voice" (243).
Here the owl is the voice of Chumash survivance.
Owens also uses natural imagery associated with the
Chumash to characterize Mundo, but the Chumash appear more directly, if belatedly, in his
story. Like California, whose "Mission" architecture and focus on its Spanish heritage whitewash
history, Mundo's family denies their Indigenous past
and erases the presence of those they dispossessed. Owens excavates Mundo's Chumash ancestry,
later writing, "Because I wanted to explore mixed
and relationship identity--the liminal landscape of the mixedblood--more fully, I also included in
The Sharpest Sight a young mestizo named Mundo
Morales who discovers in his own blood an inextricable web of inherited identities" ("Motion"
182). Owens often uses the metaphor of the "web" with
Mundo, echoing Silko and emphasizing convergence and design.
Although he suspects he is part "Indian," Mundo does not
find out until he finally fulfills his plan to ask the elderly Mondragon sisters "about the
threads that linked him to them somehow in a past that was as distant and ambiguous as the
winter sky" (143). At the top of the family tree they have
maintained for years are three names, the Spanish family patriarch, his "Castillian" wife, and
Adelita, a Chumash girl the "patrón took from the
mission.""Moraleses," they tell him, were "sired by the old patrón on a slave girl" (228).
The cross-cultural name Owens chooses, however, suggests
that she is more than a victim, for "Adelita" was a legendary soldadera in the
Mexican Revolution, the subject of a corrido, so well known that women
of strength and bravery came to be called "adelitas" (Longeaux y Vasquez 445). The sisters have
begun to chart a "whole new tree. . . . Adelita's
Indian people are over there, off the paper." This "new chart . . . goes backwards instead of
forwards" (230). In telling his history of California, Owens
is also "going backward" to insert the Chumash presence in order to go forward.
When Adelita died after being converted to Catholicism,
which prevented her from joining her own people, the dead Moraleses, ashamed of their
own blood, "made her an outcast, wandering {10}
between the worlds of dead because no one would claim her" (228). Adelita's story adds a deeper
layer of denial and dispossession to the novel--and she needs to be accepted and laid to rest in a
story parallel to Attis's. Even Mundo's Viejo had not
known about her until he died and took pity on her and "made them take her in" (229). In
addition he has tried to track down her dead relatives, but,
he says, "You can't get there from here" (230). Because it is the ghostly presence of his Viejo
who returns to earth to lead Mundo to his past, we see
Adelita as an ongoing, albeit ghostly, presence in his life. Owens gives the Viejo one of the
novel's concluding lines: "My grandson has become more
comfortable with the dead. . . . He knows at last who he is" (262). Perhaps he knows in his blood,
as we will soon see, but his lack of knowledge about
the past leaves him with more questions than answers, leaves him "imagining the young
Chumash girl, one of his grandmothers, taken by the brutal
patrón. Or had it been love? Maybe the great man had rescued her from pain and taken
her to his heart? Maybe she had ruled the heart of the man, and
his relations had ostracized her in death for that reason" (230-31). What could he know, having
been denied information about California's first
inhabitants, his "Spanish" past systematically romanticized, culturally appropriated, while its
descendants are called "spics" in local bars (208)?3
The work of Chad Allen helps provide an answer. He argues
that "rebuilding the ancestor and becoming ancestors for future indigenous
generations is a major theme" in American Indian literature (161). "Once identified," he says,
"knowledge of specific indigenous bloodlines--ties to
specific nations, bands, families, and individuals . . .--can serve as a catalyst for the recuperation
of an integrated and successful contemporary
American Indian identity" (177-78). Mundo begins this process as the novel ends--"the dark one
who bears the name of the world is becoming aware
now that his own story is very, very old and complicated," says Luther (244)--but his identity will
always require the integration of his Spanish,
mixed-blood Mexican, and Chumash blood. Yet even early in the novel Mundo seems to possess
what N. Scott Momaday calls "blood memory."
(Owens makes an ironic reference to the concept in Bone Game {11} when the postmodern trickster Alex Yazzie says, "We're
going to bring back all
those bow-and-arrow skills. Give that memory in the blood a wake-up call, so to speak" [81].) As
Allen describes,

What I call the blood/land/memory complex is an expansion of Momaday's
controversial trope blood memory that makes explicit the central role
that land plays both in the specific project of defining indigenous minority personal, familial, and
communal identities (blood) and in the larger
project of reclaiming and reimagining indigenous minority histories (memory). (16)

This is Owens's project, a relatively straightforward one in his portrayal of Mundo but far
more complicated in his treatment of Attis and Cole, as we
will see.
Mundo has no knowledge of the Chumash, but from the
very beginning of the novel, Owens symbolically reveals his Chumash blood through his
behavior. The novel opens shortly after the most significant ceremonial day in the Chumash
calendar, the winter solstice (King 71). Mundo finds
himself drawn to a bridge over the Salinas River, "swollen at flood-stage, nervous and out of
control," "the thick brown water mov[ing] past, clots of
yellow foam and trash in the troughs of waves" (3, 10).

It was an underground river. . . . Most of the year it was nothing, like the
people who had come to live along its banks, just a half-mile-wide
stretch of sand and brush and scattered trees. But in the winter and early spring, when the rains
came pounding down out of the coastal
mountains, the river rose out of its bed and became huge, taking everything in its path. Growing
up on the edge of the river, he'd come to wait
each year for the rising waters, grown to love with a kind of ache the seasonal violence when the
river tried to destroy everything within reach. It
was a strange, violent backwards, upside-down river. (5-6)

And then, sliding slowly from beneath the bridge, was a face [Attis's]. The
long, black hair washed away from the forehead, {12}
and the eyes
were open and fixed. He saw the dark eyes and broad nose and the mouth drawn back over white
teeth and the body like one of the drowned
logs swinging slowly so that now the feet aimed north. A hand rose in the choppy water as if in
casual farewell. And then only the river. (6)

Mundo is repeatedly (at least five times) drawn to bridges over the river, remarking later to
his wife, "I keep feeling like there was something that
brought me to that bridge right when I was there" (100). Descriptions of the flooding river--and
memories of its seasonal tranquility--dominate the
novel.
The Chumash mythological past was inhabited by
supernatural creatures--some malign, some benign, some celestial (notably the "Sky People,"
including the moon deity)--as well as "First People" with both human and animal characteristics.
As Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay note, "For
reasons not explained in the myths, a transformation of the cosmic composition took place during
antiquity to bring the universe to its present form. It
involved a great flood" (40). This flood was the most significant event in the Chumash past. The
only survivor, Spotted Woodpecker, was saved when
his uncle, Sun, threw him acorns. After the flood, historical time began, and First People became
the flora and fauna that made up the Chumash
ecosystem. Hudson and Underhay explain further, "Man was also created at this time, and death
was instituted" (40). "One of the most interesting [of
the First People] is the old woman Momoy, who becomes the narcotic plant Datura meteloides at
the time of the Flood," Thomas Blackburn notes
(36). Like the Choctaw, the Chumash believed the soul could live separately from the body,
especially after death, and the stories describing the soul's
long journey to Similaqsa (the Land of the Dead) are quite detailed. For our purposes, the key
moment is when the soul confronts "a body of water
that separates this world from the next, with a bridge that the soul must cross to reach Similaqsa."
A Chumash informant, María Solares, recounts
what happens:

The souls of murderers and poisoners and other evil people never reach the
bridge, but are turned to stone from the neck {13} down.
They
remain there on the near shore forever, moving their eyes and watching other souls pass. When
the pole begins to fall the soul starts quickly
across, but when it reaches the middle two huge monsters rise from the water on either side and
give a loud cry, attempting to frighten it so that
it falls into the water. If the soul belongs to someone who had no [fetish or spirit helper] or who
did not know about the old religion and did not
drink toloache [datura]--someone who merely lived in ignorance--it falls into the water, and the
lower part of the body changes to that of a frog,
turtle, snake, or fish. The water is full of these beings, who are thus undergoing punishment. . . .
Once the soul has crossed the bridge, it is safe in Similaqsa.
(qtd. in Blackburn 100)

Tormented by the sight of his dead friend who, a murderer, could not cross the bridge, but
determined to stand by him, tempted by the siren cries of
the novel's sultry murderess, Diana, and threatened by the dark designs of its truly evil villain,
Mundo nevertheless remains footsure and steady.
Threatened by death, in Vietnam, the "dead place," and in California, he, unlike Attis, manages to
keep his soul intact. He stands in the middle of the
bridge, reaching toward the future but also beginning to listen to the voices of the dead, who can
tell him about the past. His attraction to the bridge
bespeaks his liminal status as a character who must look back to move forward.
Throughout the novel, characters envision the flooding
Salinas washing away the corruption of the historical past. Diana thinks in Christian terms,
imagining the flood destroying the sinners and their sins: "it would cleanse the earth of her
father's foul constructions, of all the works of men, of her
own bloody sinew and bone" (189). Yet her visions also echo the role of the Chumash moon
deity: "Water was rising over everything, rushing from
the bowels of the earth in a fountain until it covered all, cleansing the earth in a whirling flood"
(197). The Choctaw recounted a similar story, probably
corrupted by the missionaries who preserved it, of a cataclysmic flood that resulted from the
"Great Spirit's" anger at the "corrupt {14} and wicked"
(Bushnell 531). No supernatural being causes Owens's flood: the dammed river cannot follow its
natural seasonal course. The sinners, referenced
through allusions to Jonathon Edwards, are those who attempt to control nature.
By uniting the flood with a river, Owens emphasizes a
convergence between Choctaw and Chumash mythology. While I argue that Mundo's blood
memory draws him to the bridge, he may also have been influenced by a story Attis told him in
which a bridge plays a key part, a story very similar to
the one recounted by Solares.4 Mundo remembers:

Attis began to see the dead, the lonely ghosts . . . wandering the jungle,
ghost patrols marching forest trails. . . . And at night, in whispers, he
would describe them to Mundo, explaining how the dead never left, how the war was being
crowded with the dead who kept fighting in their
death-sleep. He'd talked of shadows, and wondered aloud."There's a slippery log, Mundo. Most
people can get across and find the bright path to
a good place, but murderers can't get their footing. They fight to stay on, but they always slip.
They try to hang on, but their hands won't hold.
They fall into a black river full of snakes and dead things, and they go into a whirlpool that takes
them around and around until they wash ashore
in a terrible, dead place that they can never leave." (131; for the Choctaw story, see Cushman
167)

Attis's recounting of this story is another example of blood memory. Cole knows little about
Choctaw beliefs--and there is no evidence that Attis
knows more--until Onatima and Luther tell him that "every person has two shadows, . . . an
inside shadow and an outside one," but "only in death did
one become two" (110, 113). When a murderer dies, his "inside shadow is taken down a black
river full of snakes to a place where all the trees are
dead and the people cry and suffer all the time" (111), while the outside shadow wanders,
haunting others, feeling a "terrible loneliness" (112). After
Vietnam, Attis, unlike Mundo, cannot get his footing; a murderer, he knows he cannot cross to
the "good place," symbolized by the innocent prewar
{15} days in the California countryside with Jenna and
Cole, when the riverbed is represented as a sunny, generative place. By picking and returning
his bones, Cole saves Attis from being one of the dead who cannot leave the place that stole his
soul. As Onatima says of Attis's outside shadow, "He's
waiting for his bones, and he can't go on until we bring them back" (113). Although I cannot
locate any specific Chumash stories about twins, Owens's
reading of Momaday and others may have led him to represent Mundo and Attis as the novel's
hero twins: best friends who sign up together for a war
fought largely by people of color, they are simultaneously joined (by virtue of where they are led
by their blood memories) and separated in the novel's
first chapter, when Mundo, whose future is represented by his baby, stands on the bridge as Attis
passes beneath it.5 Readers are encouraged to believe
in the novel's ending that Mundo will be able to bridge his past and his future, and his name
makes clear that he is the novel's moral center.
But despite the tragic consequences of the Vietnam War,
Attis too has served as a bridge between the past and the future, summoned to find
evidence of the Chumash presence in California and transmitting fragments of their stories.
Pointing out that "Momaday develops 'blood memory' as a
trope for continuity across indigenous generations," Allen adds that one "related narrative tactic"
is "the re-recognition of the artifacts of indigenous
memory" (162). By focusing on the importance of the Chumash artifacts to Attis and Cole,
Owens uses blood memory, I suggest, as a trope for
continuity across Indigenous national boundaries. As Hoey says, "Us Indians are a mixed-up
bunch" (19).
In an interview, Owens commented, "Stories, it seems to
me, come out of the earth, and every culture's stories reflect the natural world within
which that culture was formed" (Lee 39). Allen makes a similar point when he writes, "I argue
that the blood/land/memory complex, like Momaday's
trope blood memory, names both the process and the product of the indigenous minority writer
situating him- or herself within a particular indigenous
family's or nation's 'racial memory' of its relationship with specific lands" (16). Despite a
complicated relationship to the state's history, Owens wrote
lov-{16}ingly about the landscape that shaped him. The
material items he found as a boy, reflecting the Chumash's relationship to the natural world he
so loved, shaped his understanding of story. His California novels examine the natural world and
the cultural productions that landscape produced in
the past--he returned, for instance, to the story of Joaquin Murietta, the story of a Mexican
written in California by a mixed-blood Native author. In
digging a cave to unearth the Chumash artifacts, Attis intuitively unearths their story. Later Cole
dreams of Attis coming to give him the evidence of a
buried past, "opening [his] closed fist to show the stone doll" (68-69). In a passage echoing
Momaday's "Man Made of Words," Cole thinks, "A long
time before men had made the two points in the bag, chipping an idea of who they were into
obsidian and flint, and somewhere nearby someone had
picked up a white stone and imagined the figure in the bag. And now the old uncle was telling
Cole he had an Indian name, a Choctaw name" (75). By
trying to understand the expressions of the dead, Cole comes to understand, for the moment, who
he is and how everyone is interconnected.
The pouch, its contents, and its symbolism of
cross-Indigeneity resurface in Bone Game. It protects Onatima as she carries it to
California around
her neck because Luther thought Cole would need it. Caught up in another story about the violent
dispossession of Native peoples, his life out of
control, hallucinating on peyote, unable to separate the past from the present, Cole sees Attis,
alive and dead, and is tempted by death, wanting to be
joined again with him. Uncle Luther, his face "shining with love," steps into the terrifying vision
to offer Cole "the little medicine pouch," which he
puts around his neck (200, 201). Luther believes that Cole has been offered a "vision," and Cole
believes the pouch is central to its meaning:
"Throughout the morning he had tried unsuccessfully to piece together the vision, coming always
to the pouch and the sensation of being lifted from
the earth by his brother's hand" (204). The imagery echoes Attis's discovery of the Chumash
artifacts in the earth. Cole's respect for the Chumash's
"idea of who they were," transmitted to him via Attis, will allow him to bargain and make peace
with the troubled spirit of the Ohlone gambler, to
escape death. Yet Cole is {17} aided by yet another
cross-tribal convergence.6 On his cross-country trek, Luther has helped a Navajo
man, who gave
him a medicine bag full of pollen. "You best add that to your medicine there," he says to Cole
(208). Had Owens lived to complete the stories only
begun in his California novels, there is no telling what might have ended up in that leather pouch.
. . . And perhaps Cole, like Owens's mother, might
have returned the Chumash figure and arrowheads to the land that engendered them.

* * *

Although Hoey might think that the Chumash are gone, Cole knows better: he says to
Mundo, "You think those Indians are all gone from here?
They're not. You go out in the hills at night some time and listen" (182). The Chumash may have
been largely invisible in California during the years
Owens grew up there, the 1950s and 1960s, but various Chumash bands have made themselves
heard at the turn of the twenty-first century. Beginning
in 1978, they mounted a successful protest, including a nine-month occupation, against the
building of a natural-gas plant at Point Conception, on the
California coast, a site they call Humqaq, the "western gate," deemed a sacred "pan-Indian" site
(Brown 187-92). They have continued to defend Point
Conception from development, protesting against the U.S. government's plans to build a
"spaceport" there, on land annexed by Vandenbergh Air
Force Base, arguing that the site should be protected under the guidelines for the National
Register of Historic Places.7 In 2003, the Santa Ynez
Chumash opened a successful casino in Santa Barbara County, which has met with vocal
resistance (see Walsh). On their Web site, the Santa Ynez
point out what the casino supports:

Since Native American gaming became a reality for our tribe, we have
begun to realize our dream of economic self-sufficiency. The revenues we
earn from our Chumash Casino Resort are used to support vital government programs for our
tribal members. From improved health care to
increased educational opportunities for our tribal members and descendents, the lives of our
tribal members have been greatly enhanced. (par. 2)

{18} While the Chumash are willing to improvise to
ensure their survival, they also recognize the sustenance of what Allen calls the "artifacts of
indigenous memory." When an anthropological study commissioned a "tomol," their traditional
canoe, the first to be built since mission days,
descendants of the Channel Island Chumash borrowed it in 1976 to retrace "ancient trade routes"
between the islands, but it was ultimately sold to a
museum (Cordero 12). In 1996 they established the Chumash Maritime Association, which built
a tomol for the use of the Chumash themselves. The
tomol, writes Julie Cordero, "tells us a story of what was in the past and what will be in the
future. It requires us to answer the questions of our future
as indigenous coastal people" (8). In The Sharpest Sight, Owens too insists that
California's past is part of its present--and its future.

NOTES

I would like to thank my co-conspirator and collaborator Susan
Bernardin for many conversations about Louis Owens.
1. See, for instance, Maggie Dwyer, Paul Beekman Taylor,
and Carolyn Holbert. In Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis
Owens, Chris LaLonde provides some
historical background about the Chumash, but his conclusion about their role in the novel is quite
different from mine:

Owens links the Salinas River with Native Americans
when he writes of Cole thinking of the Chumash (the original inhabitants of the area of the coast
and coast range from around
the present-day San Luis Obispo south to below Ventura) as "a people who seemed to have
vanished into the pale hills the way the river disappeared into the sand." The Chumash
were "the first major group of California Indians to be discovered by Europeans," the Spanish
explorer Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo first contacting them in 1542, and the mission system
in which they were indoctrinated beginning in the eighteenth century broke the circle by severing
the people from their culture and exposing them to the diseases that annihilated
them. In order to avoid suffering the fate of the Chumash, Cole must work to restore the world to
balance by finding his brother's bones and returning them to Mississippi. (76)

2. Adams wrote this in a September
17, 2007, e-mail to me. For Adams's {19} rendition of the song, visit
http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/ neh090/DC2. Adams has
studied Chumash culture and healing for over ten years and learned the owl song from his
Chumash teacher and coauthor, Cecilia Garcia.
3. As El Viejo says, Mundo's ancestry is even more
complicated, a "mess" including "Irishmen and Italians" and "a Chinese gentleman from Canton
[who] planted the seed of Moraleses
with interesting eyes in one of your great grandmothers" (230).
4. Many Indigenous peoples share a similar story; Louise
Erdrich employs an Ojibway story about crossing a bridge in Love Medicine. For a
recounting of the myth, see Vizenor (85). In
Erdrich, see especially chapters titled "The Bridge" and "Crossing the Water."
5. In "The Ludic Violence of Louis Owens's The
Sharpest Sight," Taylor argues that Owens "conjoin[s] . . . cultural myths of sacrifice that
involve twins, brothers, or warrior pairs, one of
whom dies, making the other a 'last survivor'" (218). He sees Attis and Cole as this pair.
6. In yet another example of such cross-tribal convergences,
Jacqueline Kilpatrick has explored what she sees as the parallels between Owens's representation
of Luther and Onatima and
the Blackfoot stories of Old Man and Old Woman, which Owens himself discussed in writings
about James Welch's Winter in the Blood (58).
7. Their spirited resistance has prompted a backlash from
some, who cite an essay by anthropologists Brian Haley and Larry Wilcox to suggest that
anthropologists' reconstruction (or
indeed imagining) of a unified Chu-mash culture has unduly influenced self-designated Chumash
traditionalists to participate in "an invention of tradition" (761). "Quotes from [their] article
have been used by local California newspapers to raise questions in the public's mind about the
legitimacy of many Chumash families to participate in legal hearings about ancient Chumash
sites" (Anderson, "Haley and Wilcox," par 2.). For more on these controversies, see Web sites
maintained by John Anderson: http://www.angelfire.com/id/newpubs/haleywil.html and
http://www.angelfire.com/id/newpubs/spaceport.html.

Cordero, Julie. "'Like I'd Been There Before': The Tomol Brings Her
People Back into Balance." News from Native California: An Inside View of the
California Indian World 2.5 (Spring
1998): 7-12. Print.

Dwyer, Maggie. "The Syncretic Influence: Louis Owens' Use of
Autobiography, Ethnology, and Blended Mythologies in The Sharpest Sight."
Studies in American Indian Literature 10.2
(Summer 1998): 43-60. Print.

Sherman Alexie is arguably the most visible Native writer today (among those, to be more
specific, who participate in or are associated with the
category of "Native American literature"). A prolific novelist, poet, screenwriter, essayist, and
short story writer, Alexie commands large audiences
(and honoraria) wherever he reads or speaks, and all of his recent books have become bestsellers.
Given his exalted status in the American cultural
zeitgeist, Alexie has been the subject of much discussion among literary critics, book reviewers,
and cultural commentators, conferring to Alexie both
a direct and emblematic role in conversations about American literary multiculturalism. Alexie is
something of an exemplar of a new epoch of
American literature, then, one in which an ossified national identity has been decentered and
replaced with a postmodern internationalism. In this essay
I want to explore his representation of Arab and Muslim characters in the framework of what I
call liberal Orientalism, which, roughly defined, is a
representation of Islam and the East more broadly rooted in the liberal principles of American
multiculturalism. Unlike the unmodified Orientalism,
liberal Oriental-ism is not an attempt to invent or oversee but a mode of representation, one in
which moral questions arise from a nexus of issues
central to the United States' relationship with the Muslim World. It is a form of Orientalism that
is used liberally and one that is deeply engaged with
the idea of a liberal society.
In Alexie's recent fiction, Muslims are always metonymical
of tacit intimations about America as a fundamentally good multicul-{23}tural
experiment whose conflicting mores are problematic but not ruinous, unlike the external violence
that has afflicted the United States. Muslims occupy
this metonymy without participating in the multicultural experiment; they are too busy
supplementing it by inflicting the violence. In this sense, they act
as a catalyst for a type of American self-examination that transcends unicultural participation;
this self-examination encompasses the anxieties of
military and colonial violence as it is deployed in response to forms of terroristic violence that
contravene the anguished principles of liberal
democracy. Some basic questions allow us to look at the presence of liberal Orientalism in
Alexie's post-9/11 fiction: Why are his modern-day
terrorists inevitably Ethiopian or Muslim? Why does he confine acts of Muslim terrorism to a
fantastical reproduction of the oversexed Muslim male?
And why do Muslim taxi drivers in Alexie's work seem to care so much whether or not their
passengers are Jewish? I will examine these issues
through critique of Alexie's short story collection Ten Little Indians and his novel
Flight.
In her introduction to the edited collection Shades of
the Planet, which painstakingly explores America's new literary epoch, Wai Chee Dimock
suggests that "what we nominate as 'American literature' is simply an effect of that nomination,
which is to say, it is epiphenomenal, domain-specific,
binding only at one register and extending no farther than that register" (4). Shades of the
Planet is valuable, but even its comprehensive focus does
not account for Native literature, which has a uniquely intricate relationship with the category of
American literature, in keeping with the complex
affiliations of national identity among Indians. Because North America's Indigenous peoples
predate the taxonomical criteria that underline "American
literature," they simultaneously complement and complicate the category. Much recent Native
literary criticism has attempted to extract Indian art
from an "American" orientation in favor of national identifications that cohere with tribal polities
(Justice; Weaver, Womack, and Warrior). Alexie
amplifies the ambiguities of American national identity: on the one hand, he is frequently held up
as an emblem of a new multiethnic America, but on
the other hand he reveals the limits of the American celebration of literary multiethnicity. {24}
Alexie's comment in a MELUS interview
illuminates the basic conflicts of "American literature" as a category, especially in relation to the
categories of "Native" and "American." Asked about the critical focus on possible connections
between ethnic writing and experience, Alexie
responds,

I think it's lazy scholarship. For instance, Gerald Vizenor and I have nothing
in common in terms of what we write about, how we write, and
how we look at the world. There'd be no reason to link us other than our ethnicity. He has much
more in common with experimental writing,
like William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.
I guess the problem is not that I'm labeled as a Native
American writer, but that writers like John Updike and Jonathan Franzen aren't labeled
as White American writers. They are simply assumed to be the norm, and everybody else is
judged in reaction to them. (Nygren 153)

Some critics might not be sympathetic with Alexie's complaint, though. In his fiction, Alexie
always provides a named ethnicity for each character,
even when the importance of such information is not evident. In his recent fiction, this tactic
highlights minority exoticism as a contrast to white
majoritarian normativity. Alexie contributes to the adjectival categorizing of American literature
even as he resists it. As Ron McFarland puts it, "In
most of his writing, sooner or later, Alexie is a 'polemicist,' which is to say, a 'warrior,' and there
is nearly always controversy and argument, implied or
direct, in his poems and stories" (27).
These philosophical and aesthetic intersections make Alexie
such a compelling literary and cultural figure in today's United States. I would like to
look more closely at how Alexie's post-9/11 fiction both deifies and decenters American ethnic
categories. Instead of raising these questions through
analysis of Alexie's Indian themes (so called based on their cultural exposition), I would like to
examine Alexie's thematic journeys outside of Indian
Country, in those times when he comments on American multiculturalism, something he does
frequently. Alexie is fond of deploying favorable
characters who are {25} African American, a community
for which he clearly feels an affinity. These characters include celebrities such as Robert
Johnson and Muhammad Ali in addition to invented characters who range from transients to
white-collar technocrats. In deploying African American
characters, Alexie almost always creates an arena for the development of a dialectical
interculturalism, which I employ to denote continuous but not
necessarily harmonious interchanges around both the idea and practice of ethnicity, as when the
protagonist of the short story "What Ever Happened
to Frank Snake Church?" meets Russell, "a thin and muscular black man" (206), and the two
become mutual "priests and confessors" (208).
The priests and confessors of "What Ever Happened to
Frank Snake Church?" seek their absolution in basketball, through which forty-year-old
Frank Snake Church attempts to earn redemption for a promising athletic future he abandoned
and an adulthood without vigor or excitement. Russell,
a personal trainer who learns of Frank's glory days as a promising basketball talent, coaches
Frank back into playing shape, a process that relieves
Frank of much of his life's stress. Frank ends up injuring his knee, however, ending his
aspirations to play ball again. The story first appears to be a
tragedy, a tale of a downtrodden man who works hard to re-achieve a dream that destiny ruined
for him only to have destiny interfere ruthlessly again.
In reality, basketball is only a metonym for Frank's and Russell's existential struggles with
tragedy and meaning. The story is filled with religious
language--Russell's "scrapbook was his bible, and every one of his clients was a prophet"
(207)--and has a character named Preacher, an African
American playground legend who badgers Frank during a game of HORSE, during which both
players goad one another with racial taunts.
There is much of symbolic value in the story, but I highlight
it to illustrate how Alexie attempts to create community on the margins of American
life by emphasizing the irony of race as something that is permanent but mutable. Alexie is adept
at creating characters that never quite fit into tidy
niches of American life, even if they are rooted in particular cultural practices or traditions.
"What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?" is largely
allegorical, but the {26} constant references to race
ground it in a starkly realistic world that illuminates interpersonal conflict and disparate power
structures. Frank, Russell, and Preacher share not merely their legal and temporal status as ethnic
minorities but also a philosophical and spiritual
outlook that is ardently trained on communal rather than on individual well-being. They gravitate
toward one another because of a common need for
an escape from the anxieties of an individualistic American modernity. The interpellation of
loneliness, desire, and frustration between Indian and black
characters, in this story and others, usually entails a critique of the alienation inherent in a
capitalistic society, in which ethnic minorities become
surplus to a technocratic economy and a disaggregated social structure. The presence of
numerous African American characters in Alexie's fiction is
generally an act of reverence, a way for Alexie to acknowledge the continued effects of historical
injustices.
This intersection is where Alexie is often at his funniest and
most luminous, but least ambiguous, for Alexie frequently moves beyond Indian-white
and black-Indian relations. His exploration of a multiethnic United States is topical, compelling
readers to think about a variety of moral and political
questions about culture and terrorism. This particular motif, the one focused on the role of
terrorism in the evolution of a multiethnic American body
politic, produces what I call liberal Orientalism. Given the complex history of the term
Orientalism, which includes its progression from an area of
study to a methodological critique and finally to an accusation that connotes anti-Arab racism or
Islamophobia, I would like to emphasize the adjective
liberal, although it too is weighed down with irresolvable complexity. I mean a few
things at once with the phrase liberal Orientalism, all of them
indicative of a thematic dynamic that Alexie not only inhabits but also helped create.
Liberal Orientalism conjoins two discursive traditions that
are central to the moral suppositions of Alexie's fiction. The first tradition is that of a
celebratory multiculturalism rooted in liberal discourses of American modernity. Noting
ominously that "Multicultural USA reigns over all," E. San
Juan Jr. argues that in multiculturalist discourses "all the margins, the absent Others, are
redeemed {27} in a sanitized, uniform space where
cultural
differences dissolve or are sorted out into their proper niches in the ranking of national values
and priorities" (6). The second tradition arises from the
tendency to exoticize and hypostasize Eastern subjects, usually male, that broadly corresponds
with Edward Said's use of the term Orientalism. After
9/11, the classical Orientalists--including, prominently, Said's main nemesis, Bernard
Lewis--took up analysis of terrorism, consigning its ostensibly
senseless violence to the premodern Arab and Muslim. As Mahmood Mamdani puts it, "The
modern sensibility is not horrified by pervasive violence.
The world wars are proof enough of this. What horrifies our modern sensibility is violence that
appears senseless, that cannot be justified by progress"
(4).
Liberal Orientalism, then, contextualizes Muslim terrorism
with a multiculturalist dialectic. It upholds many of the assumptions underlying
discussion of Muslim terrorism while actualizing a niche for Muslims in the American polity. It
thus creates a tension between its inclusive self-image
and the exclusivist structures innate to its fundamental logic. The exploration of a violence that is
named as Muslim necessitates a discursive
framework that tacitly upholds taxonomies of normativity and belonging in the United States.
Liberal Orientalism complicates this pattern by
outwardly rejecting those taxonomies and instead couching discussion of Muslims within liberal
notions of multicultural progress. Here the adjective
liberal, as it does when modifying Orientalism, highlights an
intellectual tradition of cosmopolitan modernity more than it does an orientation on the
American political spectrum. The cosmopolitanism celebrates American multiethnicity without
challenging the capitalist structures of modernity in
which ethnicity is both commodified and marginalized as physical and cultural surplus. Because
this intellectual tradition represents a hierarchy, not an
assemblage, Muslims do not yet participate in it at the status of agent. It is a tradition in which
Orientalism can be performed liberally and with a sheen
of enlightened contestation that in actuality strengthens Orientalist reckonings among the
empire's liberals.
Alexie's uses of liberal Orientalism are especially interesting
given his position as an ardent critic of the American dispossession of {28} Natives, a
position that Alexie interjects into his fiction both explicitly and subtly. While his thematic
commitments to various Native politics are sometimes
criticized, the strength of Alexie's desire to dislodge Indians from a subordinated position within
multicultural discourses is difficult to ignore.
Reservation Blues, for instance, contains a humorous but unmistakably biting
representation of liberal white yearnings for authentic immersions into
multiethnicity through the characters Betty and Veronica, young women who seek spiritual
immersions into the New Age image of authentic Indians.
It is Alexie's portrayal of non-Native characters within a multiethnic American modernity that
illuminates his engagement with liberal Orientalism.
Alexie has explored terrorism more than once, deploying Muslim characters--that is, characters
he names specifically as Muslim--in the service of a
social analysis that explores the moral implications of terrorism as a form of violence and of the
forms of violence that contextualize terrorism. The
polemics of Alexie's fiction set the celebrations of American multiethnicity against the more
complicated realities of an implicitly violent modernity. His
characters, though, are only nominally hypothetical. Like Sacha Baron Cohen does with his Third
World everyman Borat, Alexie outfits his terrorists
with an Islamic origin and cultural orientation.
In Ten Little Indians, for instance, two stories
use terrorism to foreground moral valuations in the framework of multiculturalism. In "Flight
Patterns," mixed-blood Spokane and midlevel executive William goes to the airport early in the
morning in a taxi driven by Fekadu, an Ethiopian
Muslim who likes to tell cryptic stories. William shares many of his furtive prejudices with
readers, an act of contrition in addition to forthrightness.
During his travels, "William always scanned the airports and airplanes for little brown guys who
reeked of fundamentalism. That meant William was
equally afraid of Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell wearing the last vestiges of a summer tan"
(107-08). Being himself "a little brown guy," William
"understood why people were afraid of him, a brown-skinned man with dark hair and eyes. If
Norwegian terrorists had exploded the World Trade
Center, then blue-eyed blonds would be viewed with more suspicion. Or so he hoped" (108).
{29}
Here William inscribes himself in a consciously
multicultural space. His brownness signifies an affinity with American norms even as it relegates
him
to an unsavory taxonomy. The body of the terrorist preoccupies William more than the ideology
of terrorism: Jerry Falwell's fundamentalism is less
threatening without a darkening of his skin. Alexie depicts the conjoining of ethnic bodies with
the ideology of terrorism as cheeky and ironic, but such
a move is arguably sincere in its moral deliberation. William is comforted by his assumption that
American racial profiling is not punitive but practical.
(It was brown people who hijacked the planes on 9/11, after all.) That assumption has a limit,
though, encapsulated in the less certain, appended
consideration "Or so he hoped." Although he appears unwilling to admit it--perhaps he is not
fully aware of it--William could point to numerous
examples of terrorism committed by blue-eyed blonds that did not result in any special profiling.
By not begrudging those who would profile him, then,
William immerses himself into a covenant that does not buttress white normativity but reinvents
a multiethnic national identity predicated on
non-Muslim citizenship. This covenant relies on convivial acceptance of difference
vis-à-vis its identification of forms of extremism that do not cohere
with America's peculiar modernity. In this way, Osama bin Laden and Jerry Falwell (with the
requisite tan) are binarized against one another on
opposite ends of America's political fringe and thus strangely depoliticized as competing,
irrational fanatics who share more in common than either
would probably care to admit. By rejecting both ends of the binary, William, an Indigenous
person, can claim access to normative American-ness
better than his brown-skinned cohorts, the Muslims.
Alexie deploys terrorism more directly in "Can I Get a
Witness?" The story begins with its unnamed woman narrator lunching at Good Food, "a
postcolonial wonder house that served Japanese teriyaki, Polish sausage sandwiches, Italian
American pizza, and Mexican and Creole rice and beans"
(69). Good Food provides the story with a philosophical tone that will later be crucial. Most of
the story focuses on the narrator's existential discussion
with a stranger amid bizarre circumstances. That discussion challenges many of {30} the United States' social commonplaces about war and
terrorism,
particularly the ethical complacency that arises through uncritical acceptance of state definitions
of terrorism, along with its steadfast
decontextualization. After the unnamed protagonist dines while contemplating existential
questions, she rises to leave the restaurant only to see a
"small and dark man" walk inside, shout in "a foreign language," and detonate a bomb (71). In
the chaos of the aftermath, the protagonist awakes from
her unconsciousness and makes her way down the street, running into a random white man who
asks if she needs assistance. She and the man
subsequently end up deep in conversation about personal and political issues.
The protagonist and her unnamed male companion speak
cryptically about their personal lives before discussing 9/11, a subject that the
postcolonial terrorist attack inevitably evokes. When the protagonist declares, "I don't think
everybody who died in the towers was innocent," she is
met by a resistance to her obvious but controversial point: "It's tough to be open-minded about
this stuff " (89). Later, the man realizes that terrorism
is a powerful force but not a threat greater than his own predilections: "Wasn't he more
dangerous to the people who loved him than any terrorist
could ever be?" (95). The story asks readers to discover a new understanding of violence, one
that is not confined to spectacular forms of terrorism (as
defined by corporate media), a distinct category because it is supposed to be both irrational and
extranational. The idea of the implicitly violent
technocrat recalls Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil," from Eichmann in
Jerusalem, as well as Ward Churchill's infamous pronouncement
that the workers in the twin towers on 9/11 were "little Eichmanns." The protagonist of "Can I
Get a Witness?" is not so dramatic, but her point is to
acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that violence is most often banal, not spectacular, and that
all humans are in some way complicit in its existence.
In this formulation, violence becomes less conspicuous, something interpersonal, dispersed
through social systems that imagine themselves peaceable,
and integral to American life, as with, for example, the business of capitalism, exemplified by the
unnamed male's production of a video game in which
killing civilians earns points. {31}
Yet even as Alexie carefully disentangles perceptions of
violence from its pornographic expressions like terrorism, he nevertheless limits it to
typical significations. The terrorist who blows up the restaurant "would eventually be identified
as a Syrian American born in Seattle and raised in
upper-class comfort by his Muslim father and Catholic mother" (72). His Muslim ethnicity does
not foreground his violent act, which is never
explained: "The investigators would conclude the bomber was either the most careful, eccentric,
and invisible terrorist of all time, or an unsolvable
mystery" (72). Alexie does two important things here: he decontextualizes terrorism from
political and historical phenomena, and he reinforces a
causal link between ethnicity and violence, in this case Muslims with irrational bloodshed. While
this double move seems contradictory, in the
framework of Alexie's disaggregated multiculturalism it is in fact archetypal. Naming the
apolitical terrorist as a Muslim--he is actually Catholic on his
mother's side, but nobody identifies him as "Christian" or "half-Christian"--embodies a liberal
Orientalist approach in which guilt and moral
responsibility based on Muslim identification are implied but never endorsed.
Alexie skillfully incorporates continual doubt into the story,
making it nearly impossible to glean from it a specific type of moral reckoning. The
suicide bomber supported both Israelis and Palestinians, was a moderate Democrat, and seemed
to harbor no ill-will toward the United States. These
attitudes do not represent a dissolution of binaries as much as they do an embrace of them, an
awareness of the need to encompass multitudes rather
than succumbing to a narrow existence. The suicide bomber is not the only character who defies
expectation. The two unnamed conversationalists
sometimes quickly succumb to their base impulses but then seem to impulsively reject the
simplistic reasoning underlying them. The male, for example,
begins worrying about the female's "brown skin and brown eyes," which recalls William's
dilemma in "Flight Patterns," before realizing, "I'm a racist
who has watched too many Stallone flicks and too much Bill O'Reilly" (77). This shift in
consciousness visualizes racism as a rightwing bromide or a
fantastical simulacrum. Alexie's characters examine racism without entering into any {32} concrete historicization, an act that influences the paradoxes
that both deify and deconstruct Orientalism in his recent fiction. Here, as elsewhere, Alexie's
characters sublimate a crude conflation of terrorism and
Islam to a type of multiculturalist liberalism that questions but does not expunge its cross-racial
assumptions.
Alexie's Flight is an exemplary novel of
post-9/11 liberal Orientalism, not only because of its paradoxical content but also because Alexie
speaks of
the novel as a meditation on the morality of different types of violence. He has noted that
"[w]hether you're left or right, Christian, Jewish or Muslim,
everyone's ideas about the [Sept. 11 attackers] are really big. They were freedom fighters, or
sociopaths" (Giese, par. 3). Despite its enormous
presence in the American cultural and political imagination, 9/11 is a germane but ultimately
superficial demarcation point for the theorization of a
literary epoch. Not only does such a move ask readers and critics to envision literature in linear
rather than synchronic time, but it also falsely
presupposes the existence of new thematic dynamics that in fact existed in American writing well
before 9/11. With Alexie, for example, his preferred
motifs did not change after 9/11; they merely shifted into a more topical geography, one in which
Muslims and terrorism have become central to
conversations about race and ethnicity in the United States. Muslims and terrorism have not
merely entered into those conversations; the multicultural
dynamic itself has shifted to accommodate a proliferation of liberal Orientalism.
The novel follows the time-traveling exploits of its main
character, Zits (whose real name turns out to be Michael), a teenage delinquent of Native
origin who has lived in abusive foster homes throughout his life. In one of his prison stints, Zits
encounters an unusually kind white person, Justice,
who appears to have supernatural powers. Justice convinces an impressionable Zits to go on a
shooting rampage in a bank lobby. At the moment that
Zits is about to pull the trigger he leaves his body and undertakes a series of time travels that lead
him to crucial understandings of his past and the
makings of modern American society. He takes on various personas: a racist FBI agent
attempting to crush a group of Indian activists that resembles
the American Indian Movement; an Indian {33} child
during the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn; an elderly soldier of the Seventh Cavalry, perpetrators
of the Wounded Knee massacre; an airline pilot named Jimmy who unwittingly trains as a pilot
an Ethiopian Muslim, Abbad, who eventually commits
some act of terrorism; and his homeless, foul-mouthed father. The scene with Jimmy and Abbad
stands out because it is the only one in the story that
does not deal with an Indian motif or Indian-white interaction. This is not to say that the scene is
anomalous; it is consistent with the rest of the book
in that it examines belonging, betrayal, and the morality of violence. Yet by deploying the scene
Alexie situates himself firmly in a debate about 9/11
that has preoccupied Americans of all backgrounds ever since the event occurred. Flight is especially apropos of post-9/11
America in relation to Abbad, the Ethiopian Muslim flight student who commits an act of
terrorism:

Alexie thought about organizing the entire book around the air-travel
teacher, whose appearance in a documentary fascinated the author. "He
started crying--I forget which of the terrorists he taught--but he said, 'He and I were friends; he
would come to my apartment and drink. Some
nights he'd get too drunk to go home, so he'd sleep on my couch,'" Alexie recalls. "In the midst of
this epic tragic event, there was this smaller,
more human betrayal, and it seemed to me that nobody has really talked about the way those
terrorists betrayed friends." (Smith, par. 5)

The terrorist in question, Abbad, is described as "an Ethiopian, a Muslim" (110), and arises
as a remembered figure in the opaque memory of Jimmy, a
flight instructor whose body the time-traveling protagonist, Zits, has come to inhabit. Abbad first
appears to be gentle and friendly--"Abbad is a
beautiful man. Small and dark and beautiful" (110)--but soon exhibits some worrisome behavior.
He promptly begins needling Jimmy: "When I came
to your door, when I said, I want to be a pilot, you immediately thought of
September eleventh. You immediately thought I was another crazy terrorist
who wanted to learn how to fly planes into skyscrapers" (110). Jimmy {34} denies this charge, noting that he and Abbad became close
friends, but it
turns out his denial is unnecessary: Abbad indeed committed an act of terrorism, the reason he
enrolled in flight school in the first place.
One of the notable features of this section of
Flight is how out of place it seems in relation to Zits's other experiences in time
travel. Alexie discards
the novel's oblique Indian motifs in favor of an ethical analysis of violence and racial profiling in
post-9/11 America. Such themes correspond with
other elements of Zits's journey into the past, but Abbad's story emphasizes a geopolitical event
that has been conceptualized as an exceptional
American moment in history. By evoking this history in the context of an anguished white
American struggling with the guilt of his imagined
complicity, Alexie reinforces the sanctification of American suffering at the hands of Muslim
terrorists, but he simultaneously endeavors to undermine
the causal fusion of Islam and terrorism. He accomplishes this seemingly irreconcilable move by
highlighting anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia even
as he outfits his Muslim characters, in this case Abbad, with clichéd attitudes that make
them sound like burlesque extremists. Abbad, for instance,
recounts having a gun pulled on him before being called a "sand nigger," but he undermines his
sympathetic position by speaking in the bromides of a
media terrorist, uttering, "You Americans love capitalism so much" (111), and, "Ah, you
Americans, you let your wives control your destiny. That is
not our way" (113). Despite the fact that Abbad promptly receives a cell phone call from his wife
that humorously discredits his claim about American
male obeisance, he is drawing from a particular rhetorical formulation that identifies a type of
invented Muslim disgruntlement from which Alexie
generates currency for the moral quandaries he introduces.
This rhetorical formulation includes some of the male
protagonist's musings in "Can I Get a Witness?" At one point, he wonders,

didn't these self-martyring terrorists believe they would be rewarded with
seventy-two virgins in heaven? Political posturing aside, didn't a few
thousand stupid men believe terror-{35}ism was another
way to get laid? What would happen if the United States offered seventy-three virgins
to each terrorist if he abstained from violence? (74)

This formulation, humorous on its face but philosophically serious, conjures Gargi
Bhattacharyya's observation "that there is something deeply and
troublingly sexualised about the representation and conduct of the War on Terror and that this
sexualisation tells us something about the racialisation
of contemporary international relations" (12). Alexie enters into this paradigm through the
discourse of the male character, for that character
contemplates male Muslim sexual motivation without any facetiousness, accompanied by the
belief that terrorism is an apolitical phenomenon
performed by men of lustful stupidity.
Other notable formulations exist. In "Flight Patterns,"
William notes that "[b]ecause they were so often Muslim, taxi drivers all over the world had
often asked [him] if he was Jewish" (114). Although Alexie adeptly complicates these notions,
exposing them to be stereotypes, William upholds the
negative assumptions that give rise to those stereotypes because he does not render his
observation a hypothetical. Alexie supplies his secondary
characters with ethnic and religious identities because he needs them to actually be Muslim;
otherwise, his readers might fail to recognize a set of
distinct moral imperatives that congregate specifically around Muslims and the United States, in
particular discourses about multiculturalism, minority
assimilation, and religious violence.
Alexie transcends the tropes of culture and religion and
connects terrorism to class and gender, a move that interjects nuance into his fiction but
nevertheless reinforces its liberal Orientalism. The terrorist in "Can I Get a Witness?" was upper
class and well educated; in Flight, Abbad can afford
private flying lessons and came to the United States not as a laborer but to acquire a degree in
mechanical engineering. All of the terrorists in Alexie's
fiction, hypothetical or real, are male, reflecting what Bhattacharyya calls "the objectification and
scrutiny of the male Muslim body" (87). Because this
move is in keeping with the demographics of real-life terrorists, people {36} of different cultural backgrounds who tend to be male, it
recapitulates the
narrative mythologies of masculine aggression to which Bhattacharyya refers. The male Muslim
terrorist of Alexie's fiction was first created in
corporate news broadcasts. Alexie's representation of Muslim terrorism is considerably more
complex than those arising from corporate and state
discourses, but certain base assumptions are common to both, particularly the requisite elements
of economic success and male belligerence. In Flight,
Abbad is both oversexed and misogynistic, chiding (the likewise oversexed) Jimmy for not
wearing "big" pants and spending more time at home with
his "beautiful wife" (112); Abbad's sexist obstinacy functions in opposition to the ostensibly
more enlightened Jimmy, who proclaims, "You might
think you control your women, but it's always the other way around. Muslim women just have to
be craftier. They can't say they're in charge, but
they're in charge" (114). Both characters are flawed, but Abbad's violent proclivities lead him to
perform his flaws in unconscionable ways, such as
taking his wife and child on the airplane he used to kill other innocent people. Jimmy, cheating
ways and all, is nevertheless rooted in modernity.
Abbad exists outside of any normative American space in order to expose the limits of
modernity.
Here Flight invokes a complex nexus of social
issues through abstruse political dialogue. Jimmy recalls a conception of modernity in which
male
control of women is frequently conceptualized as a barbaric southern ritual, but he inscribes a
sexist racism into that modernity by limiting Muslim
women to a sort of clandestine empowerment that apparently belies Western women's
unconfined agency. And by betraying Jimmy's inherent trust,
Abbad is shown to have no sense of personal responsibility to close friends, only to the nebulous
ideology that inspired his act of terrorism. Because
that act was suicidal, Abbad's body--identified repeatedly as brown and Muslim--subsumes an
Islamic propensity for destruction, one whose
mindlessness always threatens to betray the sort of decorous American credulity that Jimmy
embodies. Abbad thus becomes a political metonym that is
necessary for Jimmy to sustain a scrupulous conscience despite his personal transgressions.
Abbad is not {37} only a dreamscape in Jimmy's guilty
imagination; he is also Jimmy's unacknowledged analogue, a foil whose irrational evil highlights
Jimmy's own failings. It is the difference of their
failings--one political, the other personal--that activates a sort of liberal Orientalism in which
Islam underlies Abbad's failings whereas Jimmy's failings
are resolutely personal. Jimmy's anguish is twofold: he has done his wife wrong and has therefore
lost her trust; simultaneously he has been too
trusting by teaching a would-be terrorist how to fly. He embodies the complexities of American
life after 9/11.
This nexus of social issues reinforces Alexie's seminal role
in modern American literature as somebody who complicates simple prescriptions of
national identity. Yet Alexie's fiction is tacitly reliant on the normative categories he challenges
in terms of aesthetics, politics, and marketing. He may
have little in common aesthetically with Gerald Vizenor (though they are similar in ways that
Alexie ignores), but they share something important in
common: both writers, purposefully or not, have played a central role in comprising a tradition of
Native American literature. In so doing, both of
them, but Alexie especially, highlight issues of ethnicity in America. One of Alexie's greatest
strengths as a fiction writer, in fact, is his ability to satirize
racial commonplaces while illuminating the many ways that adherence to cultural traditions is an
integral part of human experience.
Alexie is not immune to the recapitulation of
commonplaces, however, an ailment that perhaps affects all writers (and, alas, critics). His
post-9/11
fiction renders Natives customary to American national identity by evoking the specter of Islamic
terrorism as a standard marker of inalterable
difference. Alexie complicates this simplistic formula by retaining a type of Indigenous
autonomy through nominal comparison of Indians with
brown-skinned Muslims, but those comparisons never allow Muslims into the same
philosophical or national polity, and so he ultimately leaves that
formula fundamentally intact. Nor is his tacit reliance on a liberal Orientalist imaginary limited to
Muslims. The cover of Flight illustrates one way that
an adherence to ethnic marketing reproduces fixed representational dialectics. It shows an image
of a multicol-{38}ored target with a silhouette of
presumably the main character, Zits, wearing baggy pants and holding up two of the automatic
weapons representing the violence he ultimately rejects
in the novel. The silhouette looks like a portrait of an archetypal young man engaged in thuggery.
Yet a solitary feather protrudes from his head.
This seemingly innocuous image tells us interesting things
about the marketing of the novel. First of all, it identifies the book as a "Native
American" novel, which provides it a particular appeal to its largely middle- to upper-class and
liberal target audience (from the standpoint of its
publisher, at least)--an appeal that satisfies a set of multicultural imperatives that underline the
mores of American modernity. A feather may not
actually portend Native identity, but in the corporate literary marketplace it clearly identifies a
Native taxonomy. The feather therefore implicates the
novel in the same kind of paradigmatic ethnic signification that Alexie's literary themes so
effectively contest. It is an image similar to the satirical lone
feather adorning David Treuer's vividly anti-essentialist polemic, Native American
Literature: A User's Manual, a book that offers stinging criticism of
Alexie, claiming that "Alexie isn't interested in portraying a movement or change as much as he
is interested in recreating or illuminating a condition"
(166). This condition subsists in a particular discourse of American multiculturalism in which
diversity and tolerance are highly valued by readers and
critics, but primarily as ingress to the nationalistic sympathies celebrations of Americana impel
us to uphold.
E. San Juan Jr.'s identification of national values and
priorities as essential to the creation of a "sanitized space" is relevant to Treuer's argument and
to the issue of Alexie's liberal Orientalism more broadly. I do not raise this point to claim that
Alexie's fiction creates or enters into a sanitized space;
rather, I would like to point out that, by constantly naming ethnicity in order to initiate textual
conflict, Alexie supplements and sometimes emphasizes
a mythos of cultural interplay that sanitizes multiculturalism as a national characteristic rather
than employing it to destabilize nationalism. Such a
move is particularly noteworthy vis-à-vis Alexie's Muslim characters, who exist mainly
to contextualize moral debates about topical American {39}
phenomena like terrorism and racism. Alexie's exploration of multiethnicity, then, relies on
Muslims without really including them. This literary feature
does not contravene Alexie's deployment of Indian symbology, which looks drastically different
than his Muslim thematic, but is in fact similar
philosophically: both Indians and Muslims in Alexie's fiction question sociopolitical orthodoxies,
but both rely on orthodox assumptions about the
limits of intercultural engagement--those assumptions finally concede the existence of inalterable
difference among humans.
That concession is one of the hallmarks of liberal
Orientalism, an attitude that extols difference but only in a limited context of deference to
nationalist sensibilities. (These nationalist sensibilities are not the same as military nationalism or
ethnonationalism; rather, it is a nationalism of liberal
American exuberance, a celebration of exceptionalism, a panegyric of secular modernity.) Alexie
certainly is not the only novelist today who utilizes
liberal Orientalism (John Updike, David Grossman, V. S. Naipaul, and Jonathan Safran Foer
come to mind), but he is probably its most talented and
complicated purveyor. Alexie's special talent is his ability to poke fun at the ideological
commonplaces about race and ethnicity that he simultaneously
relies on and with which readers can identify. Alexie's characters are rarely exotic, with one
exception: the Muslims who assume a caricatured
existence in order to catalyze moral conversations about violence in America's past and
present.
In Flight, one of the most interesting things
about Abbad is his sudden and ahistorical presence. Abbad is all-too-human in mundane ways,
which
promises an ideology of cultural transcendence: he teases his friends, sometimes harshly; he
seeks the company of others; he smiles perpetually; he
annoys his spouse by forgetting to run simple errands. But Abbad is a terrorist, a cold,
sociopathic killer whose inner barbarism defies his external
ordinariness. He can never truly be part of sustainable human kinship, which is why he merely
occupies an evanescent dreamscape. Abbad, unlike
Jimmy, is a man with no past, an actor whose politics are expressed in bromides, a happy person
whose hatred supersedes any propensity for
benevolence. His apparent contradictions actually foreground a {40} character that was already invented by nationalistic fantasies
well before Alexie
deployed him. In this singular character, the scope of Alexie's liberal Orientalism is lucidly
available: Abbad is like we are, but ultimately he is not one
of us. He is afflicted with something unimaginably beyond our national character.
Alexie's representations of race, articulated through
characters with highly divergent personalities and worldviews, make his fiction difficult to
harness into a specific critical framework. It would be dubious, then, to attempt to limit him to
what I deem liberal Orientalism. It is wiser instead to
highlight how liberal Orientalism affects his fiction. Alexie sometimes deploys characters who
illuminate and in some way challenge liberal Orientalism,
and at other times he appears to reproduce it himself, though it is impossible (and unnecessary) to
try to figure out when and why such a reproduction
is intentional. Ultimately, liberal Orientalism is a matter of representation, of approaching Arabs
and Muslims--or, more broadly, a perplexing East--as
humans or barbarians, in either case with the consequence of interpellating into plot and theme a
distinctly American moral or existential struggle
through their presence. Instances of liberal Orientalism in literature need not be judged as
favorable or damning to Arabs and Muslims, for to identify it
is to enter into a spectacle of representation, wherein the Arab and Muslim assume an allegorical
or antagonistic existence for the sake of American
self-reflection. The uses of liberal Orientalism, however, tell us much more about American
perceptions of Islam than they do about the presence of
actual Muslims who also happen to be American.

WORKS CITED

Alexie, Sherman. Flight. New York: Grove, 2007.
Print.

------. Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove, 2003.
Print.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil.

Publishing in the Sámi languages has always been difficult. The Sámi are
currently spread across four countries, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
There are nine different Sámi languages, some of them with only a few speakers. The
Sámi publishing industry is entirely dependent on government
funding as we do not have our own funds nor is there a system of independent foundations as is
the case, for example, in North America. Although the
Sámi language has been a language of instruction at some schools in the Sámi
area for a couple of decades, the number of Sámi readers remains very
small. Due to the various Nordic assimilation policies that were particularly harsh in the early
twentieth century, many Sámi have lost their mother
tongue, and many of those who retained the language did not learn to read Sámi at
school. One would expect national governments to amend the
situation by arranging Sámi literacy courses for adults during their workdays. These
courses would also offer much-needed spaces for learning to read
Sámi literature. However, this has not proved to be the case.
For every Sámi word I have published, I have been
forced to beg for money from the representatives of the government. Today, with the
establishment of the Sámi parliaments, much of the funding for the Sámi people
is now funneled through these bodies.1 However, especially in Finland,
the annual allocation of funds is way below what is required to adequately run Sámi
affairs and advance "Sámi cultural autonomy." Despite the Sámi
Cultural Autonomy Act, the {43} amount allocated
annually to various projects and initiatives related to Sámi culture, including
Sámi literature, is a
fraction of the total amount of the received applications.2 As a result, the
situation of the Sámi language and culture continues to worsen. Establishing
strong foundations with adequate resources is next to impossible because of a consistent lack of
funds. Moreover, the Sámi area is sparsely populated,
and the distances between communities are long. Communicating with one another is not as easy
as it is in urban areas. The distance from urban
centers also means that everything is more expensive in the North, which also increases the need
for additional funds. Demands for adequate,
systematic funding are easily justifiable if one recalls how the nation-states have been exploiting
natural resources on Sámi territory for decades, if not
centuries. This exploitation has also reduced our cultural, linguistic, and spiritual strength and
capacity to the situation in which we find ourselves
today.

THE FOUNDATION OF
SÁMI LITERATURE

Yoiking, storytelling, and oral tradition in general form the roots of written
Sámi literature. Yoiking, a Sámi way of expressing oneself and
communicating by means of chanting and singing, has traditionally been important among the
Sámi. Yoiking contains Sámi views of themselves: who
they are, where they are from, and why Sámiland belongs to the Sámi. Christian
missionaries were against yoiking especially when it was associated
with Sámi spirituality and noaiddit or shamans who were the healers and
spiritual leaders of the Sámi. When missionaries attacked the Sámi worldview
and social order and sought to outlaw them, the Sámi invented ways to maintain their
spirituality. For instance, they created yoiks that mocked and
criticized noaiddit while continuing the practice in secret. The representatives of
the church accepted these kind of yoiks but did not understand their
double meaning (see Gaski). Yoiking remained hidden after being banned by the church as
sinning and the language of the devil. The yoik tradition
prevailed particularly where the presence of church representatives was lower, such as in the
forest. Men yoiked, for example, while working with the
reindeer up {44} in the mountains (Skaltje). Yoiking
continues to be a way of communication even though it may not always contain many words. In
addition to words, communication takes place with voice and body language. The use of voice is
a very important way in which one can describe and
present almost anything.
Like yoiking, Sámi oral tradition is linked with the
Sámi perception of the world as being replete with various spirits and guardian figures.
Stories
and reminiscing have been ways of presenting Sámi history, but they have also had the
function of building the future. As with many other Indigenous
peoples, the Sámi have also had specifically chosen storytellers (or "historians") whose
role was to know and remember the stories of their and
previous generations. In this way, knowledge was transmitted not only about traditions and
bygone life but also about the land and interaction with the
land, including an understanding of human responsibilities and rights. Sámi oral tradition
also contained knowledge that remained invisible or
incomprehensible to outsiders. An example of this is a yoik titled "The Unknown Inhabitants of
the Sámi" recorded by Jacob Fellman in 1906.

FROM ORAL TRADITION TO
WRITTEN LANGUAGE

The Sámi language as a written language is young compared to the so-called world
languages. The Sámi are a small northern people who have not had
equal opportunities to promote a global awareness of their lives, cultures, and languages. As we
have never had our own state but have been spread
across four countries--Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia--we have been forced to live at the
mercy of these states. This has meant various stages
and forms of oppression, neglect, ridicule, and theft, depending on each state's national and
economic intentions. But even in small nations there are
always people and groups of people who continue to resist the outside pressures and subjugation.
The Sámi have oral histories telling about events
where they have used the same methods as their oppressors to resist and fight back. The most
well-known story is about a young Sámi man called
Lávrrakas who leads the murderers of his family {45} astray while crossing a mountain top. There are numerous
versions of this story from different
regions, and the Oscar-nominated feature film Ofelas (Pathfinder [1987]) was
based on this story.
The church recognized the importance of the Sámi
language and its centrality in conveying deeper meanings to the people. That recognition
resulted in a decision to use the Sámi language as a means of converting the Sámi
to Christianity. Bringing Christianity to Sámiland was linked to the
usurpation of the Sámi territory and its natural resources. The governor of
Österbotten, Johan Graan, is quoted of saying about Gabriel Tuderus, a
Christian minister serving a southern Sámi area (Kemi) in the mid-seventeenth century:
"If we want to have God's permission for our acts and for
mining the Sámi gold and other precious metals, we have to give the Sámi the
gift of the word of God which is even more valuable than gold. It is the
King's wish and this work is carried out with great force by Tuderus" (Itkonen 219). The church
and the states understood that the word of God was
most effective in the Sámi mother tongue. This resulted, in the seventeenth century, in
the first translations of basic religious material in the Sámi
language, such as a book of psalms as well as an ABC book. It took another hundred years for the
New Testament to be translated. The number of
religious translations increased at the end of the nineteenth century, when texts such as the Bible
were translated. Many of these texts were translated
by Lars J. Haetta, a Sámi man who was convicted and imprisoned in Oslo for the 1852
Guovdageaidnu uprising.3 He and another Sámi convict,
Anders Baer, also wrote stories and psalms, but they were not published in the Sámi
language until in 1956.
Some of the representatives of the church recorded
Sámi oral tradition and yoiks starting in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most
well-known
church representative is Olaus Sirma, a Sámi man who was studying to become a
minister in Uppsala and recorded Sámi yoiks. Two of these yoiks,
"Moarsi fávrrot" and "Guldnasas," were translated into Latin and published in Johan
Sheffer's Lapponia, the first ever monograph on the Sámi people,
in 1673. One of the two translated yoiks, "Guldnasas," later inspired writers such as J. G. Herder.
In the eighteenth century, another Sámi minister,
Anders Fjellner, recorded Sámi oral tradition with the intention {46} to create a Sámi national epic similar to Finnish
Kalevala. The epic was never
completed, but many of the yoiks and stories collected by Fjellner remain.

EARLY SÁMI
AUTHORS

At the turn of the nineteenth century the Sámi language was still strong and rich
compared to its present-day status. However, various practices and
policies of assimilation meant that the use of Sámi was restricted and often banned. One
of the policies was to prevent Sámi teachers from returning
home to work at local schools. This restriction resulted in a resistance among some Sámi
teachers, and in the Leavdnja (Lakselv) region, a handful of
Sámi teachers established a Sámi newspaper Ságai
Muitaleaggji (The Messenger [1904-1911]) that immediately became a platform for an
intense
debate about the preferred language of instruction at Sámi schools and whether the
Sámi language should be taught in school. In the early 1900s there
were also a couple of other Sámi newspapers, but they were even shorter lived than
Ságai Muitaleaggji. Anders Larsen was the editor of Ságai
Muitaleaggji, and he also wrote stories and poems for the newspaper. In 1914 he
published a book, Beaivvi álgu (Dawn), which is a story about the
Norwegian assimilation policies and their consequences on a young Sámi man. At the
end of the book, however, the protagonist gains a new faith in
his Sámi roots and language, which represents a new dawn for the Sámi people.
This spirit of the "new dawn" is also apparent in a poem written by
Larsen's contemporary Isak Saba that later became the Sámi national anthem. The
beginning of published Sámi literature is often considered to be
Sámithe's 1910 book Muitalus sámiid birra (A Story about the
Sámi). The book was a collaboration between Johan Turi, a Sámi reindeer herder,
and
Emilie Demant Hatt, a Danish ethnographer who helped Turi to write and publish the book in
Sámi and Danish. The book is a collection of brief
accounts about the Sámi origins, traditions, worldview and belief system, and traditional
practices of healing, and it also documents the changes the
Sámi were experiencing as the result of the encroachment of the nation-states.

{47}

RACE RESEARCH AND
PUBLISHING SÁMI LITERATURE

The publishing of Sámi literature in Finland has somewhat peculiar roots. In 1932 an
organization called Lapin Sivistysseura (the Civilizing
Association of Lapland) was established in the Department of Anatomy at the University of
Helsinki. According to one of the faculty members, Finnish
race research scholar Väinö Lassila, Finland did not adequately look after the
civilizing of the Sámi. Together with others, Lassila established the
association to create better possibilities for the development of the Sámi "from their own
premises." At that period, this implied that the Sámi were
allowed to learn to read and write but otherwise needed to remain "a pure race." Lassila himself
was critical of race research and craniology, also
common among the Sámi in the early twentieth century (Isaksson).
In 1932 Lapin Sivistysseura established a magazine in the
Sámi language, Sápmelas (The Sámi). In the beginning, the
magazine was a mere
four-page publication, but it was distributed to all Sámi households in Finland for free.
The magazine used a different orthography than the one used
on the Norwegian side of Sámiland in religious books and other publications, but many
Sámi were able to learn the new orthography. In the 1940s the
magazine moved to the Sámi region Anár, and it joined the forces with a
Sámi association, Sámi Litto, that was established during the evacuation of
the Sámi at the end of the Second World War. This is also when the magazine gained its
first Sámi editors, such as Hans-Aslak Guttorm, Pekka
Lukkari, and many others, who were often both teachers and writers and saw the importance of
maintaining the Sámi language.
In the 1960s another Sámi magazine,
Deanubákti (Dea the Cliff), was published by a local Sámi
organization for a short period. Deanubákti
consisted mostly of pieces by young Sámi attending the teacher-training college and
aspiring writers for whom the magazine offered a platform for
publishing their stories and poems.
Lapin Sivistysseura was also involved in publishing
Sámi literature. As early as in 1940, the organization published Hans-Aslak Guttorm's
poetry
collection Gohccan Spálli (Awakened Gust of Wind). My first book,
Soagu (Marriage Proposal), was published {48} by Lapin Sivistysseura in 1971
(they published two other titles by me in the 1980s). The association also published the late
Nils-Aslak Valkeapää's first poetry collection, Lávllo vizar
biellocizás (Sing Warbler, Bluethroat), in 1975. Previously, the association had
already published Sámigiel Abis (Sámi ABC Book, 1935) and
Nuottasálbmagirji (Book of Psalms, 1941), which were delivered to
Sámi schools after the Second World War. However, the ABC book was used
only by some Sámi teachers who cared enough about education in the Sámi
language and were not fearful of criticism by colleagues or parents.
Teaching in the Sámi language was not on the agenda, and the authorities in general did
not appreciate the teaching of the language in schools. In my
school in Vuovdaguoika (a small community in Utsjoki, the northernmost municipality in
Finland), the local and long-time Sámi teacher Hans-Aslak
Guttorm occasionally taught Sámi in secret.
Lapin Sivistysseura also published a handful of other
religious booklets and a monograph on the difficult situation of the Skolt Sámi, who,
after the
Second World War, were relocated from the Soviet Union to Finland and who had to live in dire
socioeconomic circumstances (poverty, poor
housing, and unemployment). The association also sought to improve the living conditions of the
Skolt Sámi living conditions through fundraising
campaigns. One of the individuals involved in fundraising was Robert Crottet, a man of French,
Russian, and Swiss background who collected Skolt
Sámi oral tradition and later published a book that has been translated into Finnish,
Kuun metsä (Moon Forest [1954]). Finnish scholar Karl Nickul
was also actively involved in these activities and edited a book of photographs
Suenjel (1933) about the Skolt Sámi lives and land. All in all, in its
seventy-five-year existence, the association has done important work to support Sámi
language and culture (such as arranging cultural events and
handicraft exhibitions and publishing books and other materials in Sámi), even though it
was established upon anthropological premises and even
though it sometimes issued statements involving the Sámi without consulting the
Sámi (a practice that was almost standard at the time).
The first Sámi books were published outside
Sámiland, and they {49} did not always reach
their Sámi readership. Another reason for this
inadequate distribution was the lack of a single orthography. The Sámi in Norway and
Sweden had adopted so-called Bergsland-Ruong orthography in
1950-51, whereas the Sámi in Finland used the so-called Lapin Sivistysseura
orthography. These were quite different from one another and were a
barrier to Sámi publishing. For example, the állagat (Writings)
series, fifteen booklets published in mid-1970s by the Sámi Committee for Sámi
Literature in Kárásjohka (in Sámiland), was written according to
Bergsland-Ruong orthography, which prevented the books from being used in Finnish
schools although they would have filled a serious need for material in Sámi. The
Sámi, however, wanted to communicate in writing with one another
across the nation-state borders and to facilitate the production of textbooks. After years of
negotiations, a common orthography was accepted in 1979.

THE SÁMI WRITERS'
ASSOCIATION

The Sámi Writers' Association was established in 1979, and it was meant to become
a professional organization for all Sámi writers in the Nordic
countries. The mandate of the organization is to promote and support Sámi writers and
Sámi literature by establishing scholarships, seeking support
for funding for publishing, offering professional mentoring, and organizing seminars and writing
workshops. It was also important to have a forum to
communicate with other Sámi writers. I chaired the organization for five years from
1980-85. During this period the organization established its roots
in Sámi society. We organized writing courses for both writers and young people and
worked on encouraging people to write in the Sámi language.
Many individuals took up this challenge and have since published novels, children's books, and
other literature. In its early years the organization also
published a magazine, Dollagáddi (Bonfire), which also served as a
platform for emerging writers but did not survive for long due to funding
difficulties and a lack of human resources. We also published an anthology of Sámi
literature, Savvon (Stream Pool), in 1983. In 1989 the Sámi
Writers' Asso-{50}ciation held a campaign titled
"Strengthen the Sámi Language," the objective of which was to raise awareness of the
Sámi language
and the importance of Sámi literature. Among other things, the campaign organized a
writing competition for youth, and two years later the
association published the results as an anthology. The campaign also published álli
giehta ollá guhkás (A Writing Hand Reaches Far [1989]), a book
by Harald Gaski and Nils Øivind Helander on Sámi literature.
The position of the organization as a representative of the
Sámi writers has been often dependent on the capacity and work of each chair. The
biggest disagreements have been about whether the organization should nominate Sámi
literature not written in the Sámi language to the Nordic
Literary Prize. Sámi writers who either cannot or have chosen not to write in
Sámi remain a minority within the organization, as most Sámi literature
continues to be written in the Sámi languages.4 Sometimes such writers
have felt excluded from the organization and its goals, but the organization has
argued that Sámi literature published in Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, or even German is
eligible for support and candidacy through mainstream
structures that are not available for literature written in Sámi. Some Sámi writers
have indeed won literary prizes for their books published in Nordic
languages. Aagot Vinterbo-Horn won the Tarjei Vesaas literary prize in 1987 in Norway, and my
novel translated into Finnish, Voijaa minun poroni
(Graze in Peace My Reindeer), was nominated for the Finlandia literary prize in 1987. Neither of
these nominations came through the thinly stretched
nomination board of the Sámi Writers' Association.

THE EMERGENCE OF
SÁMI PUBLISHING HOUSES

Around the same time as they adopted a common orthography, the Sámi were also
starting their own publishing activities with the establishment of a
small Sámi publishing house Jorgaleaddji (Translator) in the small Sámi town of
Fanasgieddi, Norway. Jorgaleaddji published several Sámi authors,
such as Hans-Aslak Guttorm, Eino Guttorm, Inger Halvari, Marry A. Somby, and me.
Jorgaleaddji also published textbooks and other educational
material. From the publisher's inception, its funding was dependent on a single source-- the
Norwegian government, a fragile foundation upon which to
build a publishing house. Jorgaleaddji also {51}
published Sámi authors in Finland, and for a short period, the publishing house
collaborated with
another small Sámi business, Girjegiisá (A Book Chest), which was both a local
bookshop in Ohcejohka/Utsjoki, Finland, and a book publisher. The
intention was to strengthen Sámi publishing with cross-border collaboration, but it did
not work out as intended as the Finnish government did not
allocate the funding necessary for running the enterprise. Jorgaleaddji went bankrupt in the
mid-1980s--even the Norwegian government funding to
publish Donald Duck in the Sámi language (which appeared for a couple of
years) did not manage to rescue the first Sámi publishing house. It is
unclear what exactly caused the bankruptcy, but some books were produced so cheaply that they
did not last long in use.
After a short period of silence, another Sámi
publishing house was established, this time in the Sámi town of
Kárásjohka, Norway. Davvi Media
(Northern Media) was established by some of the same people who founded Jorgaleaddji, but
again it did not survive too long. However, in a way it
had a successor, as Davvi Girji (Northern Book) was established in 1990. Davvi Girji is a locally
and Sámiowned publishing house that has published
Sámi literature, textbooks, dictionaries, scholarly publications, and literature translated
from other languages into Sámi. It continues publishing to this
day.
In Sweden a local Sámi organization, Vuovjjus, had
published a newsletter of the same name in the 1970s. In the 1980s Vuovjjus published a
couple of books, and gradually it gave birth to a Sámi publishing house, Dat. Nils-Aslak
Valkeapää, a writer himself, became the director of Dat. Like
Davvi Girji, Dat publishes Sámi books independent of national borders, but since the
unexpected death of Valkeapää in 2001, Dat has been going
through a quieter period.
The Sámi Council has been working to publish
books in the Sámi language and has published, for example, Eino Lukkari's 1979 novel
Bas Gálle
(Little Carl).5 Since 1994 the Sámi Council has granted an annual
literature prize that has encouraged Sámi authors to write. {52} For several years it
also had a Sámi literature purchasing policy through which the Sámi Council
annually purchased 450 copies of each title of Sámi literature published in
that year to distribute them to Sámi institutions such as schools, daycares, elders' homes,
and hospitals. In 2000, however, this practice was terminated
because the Nordic Council of Ministers discontinued its funding of the project. The book
purchasing policy was in many ways critical to Sámi
publishers and writers because it guaranteed sales. Putting an end to this practice also limited
readers' access to Sámi literature. In a longer term, it
resulted in financial difficulties in publishing Sámi literature and decreased the number
of books published annually (which were already low). The
Sámi Council and the Sámi Writers' Association have been working to
reestablish the policy, but thus far they have had no luck in persuading the
Nordic Council of Ministers to resume its support of the project. The general annual meeting of
the Sámi Writers' Association in 2007 issued a
statement to the Sámi Parliamentary Council and requested that the council increase its
efforts to support Sámi literature and place the reinstatement
of the literature purchasing policy on its agenda.6 Largely, Sámi political
bodies have been paying lip service toward the importance of the Sámi
language and its maintenance through Sámi literature, but they have done relatively little
to increase funding for publishing Sámi literature and
supporting Sámi writers who cannot make a living from writing but depend on short-term
scholarships and other jobs. The statement notes:

In 2006, the Sámi Writers' Association has requested the
establishment of a book purchasing policy of Sámi literature to the Norwegian
Sámi
Parliament which forwarded the request to the Sámi Parliamentary Council. The
Sámi Writers' Association has not heard anything back from the
Parliamentary Council. This is why the Association's annual general meeting of 2007 is forced to
remind the Parliamentary Council about the
request. We the Sámi have the right to advance our language and it is our wish that our
elected body, the Parliamentary Council, prioritizes the
work that is required to maintain {53} and develop a
living Sámi language. The Association's annual general meeting considers the book
purchasing policy a central mechanism in supporting the Sámi language. Further, the
Association's annual general meeting reminds the role of
Sámi literature in promoting and advancing the Sámi language. Books,
audiotapes and other material also showcase our society and Sámi life. A
book suits people of all ages.

ESTABLISHING A PRIVATE
PUBLISHING ORGANIZATION

When I started writing in the mid-1960s, the faith in the survival of the Sámi
language was minimal. Many people did not consider it possible to
actually write books in Sámi. Not many Sámi were able to read or write in
Sámi, although the older generation managed to read the old orthography
that was used in Norway in order to have access to religious texts. For example, my father's
generation used to read sermons in Sámi. Sámi literacy
was killed by the governments' assimilation policies. After the Second World War, all children
were required to attend school. If they did not live in the
town or village where the school was located, as was the case with many Sámi children,
they were required to stay at the school's residence. The
schools were mixed (i.e., Sámi and non-Sámi), which meant that
non-Sámi children and teachers generally looked down upon Sámi culture and
language, thus stigmatizing Sámi identity for many children. Sámi children also
had to learn the language of the majority (many did not speak it until
they started to attend school). Some children were able to go home for the weekends, but many
went home only for longer holidays. Before the war,
Sámi children only attended school for a couple of months a year, which meant that their
connection to home as well as to Sámi culture and language
was not disrupted. After the war, however, Finland passed a law requiring a mandatory
seven-year school attendance.
Our generation, the baby boomers, was exposed to the harsh
pressures of Finnish cultural policies that did not have much room for the Sámi
language. I did not, however, want to believe in these policies but started writing stories to the
Sápmelas magazine and {54} soon
wrote Soagu. In its
introduction, I wrote that "I see myself as somebody who carefully goes out on the autumn ice
where nobody has yet traveled. Or if they have, they
have crossed it in a way that their tracks are invisible and I have to find myself a strongest way"
(Paltto 5). I wrote about the beauty and complexity of
the Sámi language and how easy it is to describe anything with it. Soagu is
a collection of accounts and stories based on those I had heard in my youth
at the River Deatnu, from ice break-ups to figures of Sámi oral tradition, from traditional
marriage proposal practices to accounts of magic.
In 1989 another Sámi writer, Inger-Haldis Halvari,
and I established a Sámi publishing association, Gielas (Keel). Soon after, Eino
Kuokkanen,
who has translated three of my novels into Finnish, joined us to do the layouts. When the
publisher Jorgaleaddji went bankrupt, we realized that the
only way to get books published was to do it ourselves. Halvari, however, resigned from the
association soon after its establishment and did not
publish any of her books through Gielas. She was replaced by Ingrid Tapio, also a Sámi
writer. We applied for funding from the Norwegian and
Finnish governments and were able to publish six titles altogether, five of my books and one
translation, a novel by Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov.
Initially, publishing our own books was exciting: we could
choose the style, layout, and cover ourselves. Soon, however, applying for funding for
every single title separately became rather burdensome--something of which I was in charge of
doing. It was a lot of work first to write the book and
then to seek funding for publishing it. Further, the printer we used was Finnish and had no staff
with any knowledge of Sámi. This resulted in several
typos and mistakes, especially in the first title Gielas published, Guovtteoaivat nisu
(Two-Headed Woman [1989]). In addition, the printing was always
delayed, and the books did not come out when planned. After eight years, with only two other
people working with me, I no longer felt able to
continue with Gielas. The last title Gielas published was in 1997, my collection of poetry
Bestoriin (With a Wagtail). After we decided to discontinue
the publishing business, I was relieved although I knew that getting my work published would
again be {55} more difficult. Following Gielas, I did not
get anything published until 2001, when Davvi Girji published the collection of short stories
Suoláduvvan (Stolen), nominated for the Nordic Literary
Prize and awarded the Sámi Council Literary Prize in 2002.
Since the publishing of Suoláduvvan, I
had to wait for six years until my subsequent manuscripts received the required funding for
publishing. The
final installment of my trilogy was finally published in 2007, as was a collection of short stories
for youth Ája (A Spring). It seems that fiction is largely
forgotten and ignored in Sámiland, as it is in other parts of the world. The states do not
seem to care to fund a Sámi literature whose sales are minimal.

THE CHALLENGES OF
PUBLISHING SÁMI LITERATURE

The publishing of Sámi books by the Sámi themselves has been unorganized
and usually dependent on a handful of active individuals. There have been
short-lived literary magazines and small publishing houses that have not been able to survive
because they lacked the necessary financial or human
resources. The dream has always been to have a secure foundation to publish literature first and
foremost in the Sámi language and later expand to the
rest of the world. Currently, however, there is no sign this dream will come true in the
foreseeable future. There was some hope after the Alta River
case in the early 1980s, when Norwegian authorities were more responsive to Sámi
demands than before and, among other things, started a process of
mapping the needs of Sámi society.7 The Norwegian government was
also more willing to fund Sámi initiatives than before. Since then, Norway has
been at the vanguard of funding Sámi literature--one can argue that it is the Norwegian
government that has maintained and upheld the fragile
foundation of Sámi literature and helped it to continue to exist.
Although publishing Sámi literature has not been
easy, one can say that, starting in the 1960s, there has been established a strong foundation for it.
Currently we have several Sámi publishing houses (all of them very small except Davvi
Girji and Dat), all on the Norwegian side of Sámiland since the
Norwegian government has been {56} most supportive of
funding it. Despite the chronic lack of funding and despite the several years' wait that
Sámi
authors have to endure to see their work published, it is inspiring to see that the Sámi
continue writing in their own language. The older generation has
started to learn to write their mother tongue so that they can record their lives for future
generations--they see it as a crucial tool for transmitting Sámi
knowledge and values to younger people. Young writers continue to emerge, some of whom start
with yoik lyrics and later move to the written form.
The board of the Sámi Writers' Association currently includes two young male
writers--also a new development. The younger generation is actively
writing and insists on writing in the Sámi language. I saw this clearly in
Kárásjohka at the end of 2006, when I held a writing course at the local high
school. Students who have taken classes in writing Sámi since primary school have quite
a different foundation than we who, when we started writing,
did not even know how to transcribe the Sámi language on paper or how the letters
should look.
It is my hope that Sámi literature will become better
known throughout the rest of the world. There is a need for more translations into majority
languages and for stronger information and marketing campaigns. Sámi texts have their
own specific rhythm. We also live in a very multicultural
environment with various views and thoughts. The Sámi are, if you will, on the top of the
world where they look at life and the world, learn from it,
and live closely with the land. This is what the rest of the world needs to hear and listen to.

NOTES

1. The Sámi parliaments are
elected bodies (by registered Sámi individuals) who represent the Sámi interests
especially at the national level.
2. The Sámi Cultural Autonomy Act was passed in
1995 in Finland and it stipulates the Sámi have the right to maintain and advance their
language and culture. That same year, the
Finnish Constitution was amended to recognize the Sámi as an Indigenous people.
3. Guovdageaidnu is a reindeer-herding Sámi
community and the birthplace of a Christian revivalist movement, "Cuorvvut" (Shouters), in the
{57} eighteenth century.
The movement,
characterized by powerful sermons and ecstatic stages, got its name from travelling lay
Sámi preachers who preached doomsday and penance and were particularly against
alcohol. The
reasons leading to the uprising are too complex to elaborate here in detail, but in short, the
uprising, linked to the revivalist movement, wanted to purge their community from sin and bad
influence. In the uprising, the local non-Sámi shopkeeper and police superintendent were
killed, and the minister almost was beaten to death by local Sámi. The two leaders of the
uprising
were executed in 1854. Lars J. Haetta was one of the participants in the uprising and was
sentenced to prison.
4. The North Sámi is, by far, the biggest language
group, and most Sámi literature has been published in the North Sámi. It is also
the operating language of the Sámi Writers'
Association. In this article, "the Sámi language" refers to the North Sámi unless
indicated otherwise.
5. Previously, the council was the Nordic Sámi
Council, until 1989, when the Russian Sámi joined the nongovernmental organization
(NGO). The Sámi Council, established in 1956, is
an NGO representing Sámi organizations.
6. The Sámi Parliamentary Council is a
collaboration body for the three Sámi parliaments in Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
7. The Alta River conflict is considered a watershed in
Sámi-Nordic relations. It involved a plan by the Norwegian government to build a
hydroelectric dam in northern Norway (see, e.g.,
Brantenberg; Paine; Parmann; Sanders). In its original form, the dam would have submerged the
Sámi village of Máze (Masi) and a considerable portion of important reindeer
grazing and
calving areas in the heart of the reindeer-herding region. The government plans were met with
unexpected resistance by the Sámi as well as by environmentalists and fishers who
wanted to
protect the salmon that inhabit the river.

Apelles's
War
Transcending Stereotypes of American Indigenous
Peoples in David Treuer's The Translation of Dr.
Apelles

DAVID YOST

With the possible exception of Dr. Apelles's full-page sigh, no sentence in Anishinaabe
author David Treuer's The Translation of Dr. Apelles calls
more attention to itself than that which ends the "Translator's Note"--"It was a time of " (2)--and
continues in the prologue in bold-faced type--"war"
(3). Yet despite the emphasis of this claim, warfare is surprisingly absent from the story of
Bimaadiz and Eta. The narrator explains from the beginning
that this "war" is not, as the reader might think, "between the people and their enemies across the
river" (3); though a "small band to the north" later
raids the protagonists' village (104), the attack forms only a single incident among many. In the
Apelles and Campaspe sections, this absence is even
more pronounced. While Treuer's previous novels, Little and The
Hiawatha, each contain at least one brutal murder, Dr. Apelles lives a placid life in
his solitary apartment and a variety of libraries; his happiness is threatened not by violence but
rather by extreme isolation.
The war that gives The Translation of Dr.
Apelles its shape, then, does not appear to be a war of nations or tribes. Rather, it is a war
of texts. Like
Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, The Translation of Dr.
Apelles emphasizes the importance of "translating" one's own story for a
lover to "read." However, Apelles also complicates this process by showing the text
that Euroamerican culture has already created for its Indian
characters: an idyllic pastoral romance modeled on Daphnis and Chloe, whose
protagonists are here disguised under the names Bimaadiz and Eta.1
These sections repre-{60}sent the simulation of
Indigenous life into which Apelles, an Anishinaabe scholar, fears disappearing, and only by
writing his
life story in explicit counterpoint can he "translate" his life for others as well as for himself.
Despite David Treuer's rising profile in the national media--
including interviews in The New York Times (Smith) and The Washington
Post
(Charles) and several articles on the popular Web site Slate (Treuer, "Going
Native" and "His Home")--his novels have received surprisingly little
academic criticism, and The Translation of Dr. Apelles has yet to receive any
scholarly attention beyond its initial reviews. The few articles that exist
on Treuer's other novels, however, provide a useful starting point in approaching
Apelles.
In the only full-length academic article on
Little yet published, David Stirrup notes Treuer's now well-known skepticism of
"cultural"
readings--defined by Stirrup as scholarship that reads texts purely as products of their cultures,
without regard to their individual characteristics or
"artistry"--and responds by constructing a "double-stranded reading" of Little,
examining how it might be read through both "culture-specific" and
"literary" lenses (652). Stirrup explores Little's death in some detail, comparing it to the
"resurrective cycle" of both Christian and Anishinaabe
mythologies (662), but he also examines how Little situates itself against
essentializing "cultural" readings of contemporary Indigenous literatures.
Through juxtaposed scenes such as Stan's and Donovan's deer hunting and Paul's slaughtering of
a cow, Stirrup argues, the novel works to "teasingly
encourage the assumption of stereotypes that deny the personal, local issues these sequences
engage with" (656). By luring the reader into these
essentialist readings, but then showing the limitations of these readings, Little
ultimately "both tempts and resists the cultural reading" (667).
In Padraig Kirwan's "Remapping Place and Narrative in
Native American Literature: David Treuer's The Hiawatha"--like Stirrup's, the only
article
on its subject to date--the author takes a similar approach. He argues that The
Hiawatha consciously inverts a common plot of the "Native American
novels" that preceded it: the "homing pattern" by which Indigenous characters must return to
{61} their "tribal and individual roots" (2). Listing three
"critical preconceptions" for Native American fiction ("that the tribal novel must always tell the
story of 'dispossession' rather than one of sovereignty;
the Indian protagonist must journey home to find his/her 'inborn Indian consciousness'; and
Native writers are 'recovering' Indians"), Kirwan
demonstrates how "Treuer adopts the realistic style of writing found in The
Hiawatha as a means to overturn such preconceptions" (6). Most notably,
the troubled protagonist Simon attempts a return to his home reservation, only to find it "a
foreign country," so artificial to him that it is "as if he had
stepped onto the shore of a novel" (Treuer, Hiawatha 189); the experience gives
him "no revelation, no recognition" (189). Simon's return to nature is
similarly disastrous. After being lost in the woods for days, he finally staggers out filthy,
dehydrated, and incontinent (221), with a broken leg (209)
and a bird's nest for a hat (223), looking, in the memorable phrase of the trucker who rescues
him, "like a bag full of assholes" (222). The Hiawatha also resists a commonplace of
Native American literatures, Kirwan argues, by subverting "the notion that the Native American
novel
is inherently tragic" (8). Though the novel does contain tragic elements, such as the death of
Simon's nephew, Lincoln, The Hiawatha makes it clear
that these tragedies did not befall the characters "because they are Indian" (Kirwan 11). Rather,
the events stem from a specific "single fatal deed" in
Simon's past--his murder of his brother, Lester (11). In conversation, Kirwan reports, Treuer
described these subversions as a form of "guerrilla-type
warfare" that he is waging against the restrictive expectations for Indigenous novels (8).
While Little and The Hiawatha
subvert genre expectations im plicitly, The Translation of Dr. Apelles makes this
warfare far more explicit by
including a text-within-a-text, a pastoral romance of noble savages that embodies Euroamerican
stereotypes and stands in stark contrast to the more
realistic story of Apelles. In the pastoral sections, heroes Bimaadiz and Eta are suckled
independently by wild animals, allowing the pair to gain,
respectively, the moose's "power" and "the wolf 's characteristics" (43, 44); the narrative suggests
that the pair also inherit an animalistic ability for
hunting and {62} trapping, as well as a preternatural
closeness to nature. Their story is filled with preposterous coincidences--such as when the two
are reunited simultaneously with both sets of long-lost parents--as well as prose that could be
lifted from a drugstore romance novel: falling in love
with Eta, for example, Bimaadiz becomes a "captive of her beauty" and a "slave of desire" (185,
112).
More significantly, Bimaadiz and Eta speak in the formal,
epic register that Euroamerican culture has often associated with Indians. Treuer has
suggested in interviews that his Native American Fiction: A User's Manual can be
read as a sort of "companion piece" to Apelles (Kennedy 58), and
his description there of Fools Crow, by Blackfeet/Gros Ventre author James Welch,
applies equally well to the story of Bimaadiz and Eta: "Each
character speaks in sentences that are, for the most part, complete, discrete, thoughts. . . . In every
speech moment--regardless of class, age, gender, or
even species-- the characters speak the same way" (89). Treuer sees these elements of Welch's
book as originating in "the nineteenth century literary
landscape," particularly in "Cooper's Indians" (102, 100). In Bimaadiz and Eta's tale, this trait
often assumes comic proportions. Even while
Maanendamookwe is giving Bimaadiz a hands-on lesson in sex, for example, her sentences
remain remarkably formal and coherent: "'Just as when you
hunt,' she moaned, 'you have to see your target to make sure your shot will go where you want it
to'" (234).
In the same critique, Treuer also notes the artificiality of
Fools Crow's "'culturally derived' expressions such as 'moon of falling leaves' and
'Cold
Maker,'" suggesting that Welch uses this "Indian-English" inconsistently and with the final effect
of creating a sense of "otherness" around his Pikuni
characters (79-80). Once again, Bimaadiz and Eta's story employs nearly identical expressions to
those Treuer describes in Fools Crow. When the
child Bimaadiz cannot open an icy door flap, for example, he is described as "too weak to break
the grip the winter-maker had laid on his lodge" (8;
emphasis mine), a phrase that directly recalls Welch's "Cold Maker." Bimaadiz is kidnapped in
the "month known as the Stingy Moon" (103) but heals
by "the Moon of the Returning Eagles" (112), phrases that closely parallel Welch's "moon of
falling leaves" in their formu-{63}lation. Though "the
Moon of Returning Eagles," for example, corresponds to a lunar cycle of the Anishinaabe
calendar, the text refers to this cycle not by its
Anishinaabemowin name, migizi-giizis, but in Fools Crow--like,
deliberately othered "Indian-English."
Though instances of Anishinaabemowin do appear in the
Bimaadiz and Eta sections, particularly in character names and songs, the narrator quickly
translates most of these moments into English. For example, when Bimaadiz--whose name
translates as "he lives"--receives his name, the narrative
helpfully explains that it was because he "was alive, against all odds" (12). When Eta ("only") is
named, the narrative again echoes the origin of her
name in English (22); Gitim ("he is lazy") is noted following his introduction as being "lazy and
habitually averse to risk" (88). Even when Eta sings
her brief song about the large beaver she trapped (100), the narrative provides context clues that
border on outright translation: "Sure enough, she had
a large beaver sliding along behind her" (101). Like the instantly translated, "textually irrelevant"
Anishinaabemowin phrases of Love Medicine that
Treuer criticizes in Native American Fiction, arguing that Louise Erdrich employs
them only as "ornament" rather than a "working part" of the novel
(61), the Anishinaabemowin names and songs of these sections serve as little more than
decoration, containing scant information not already made
available to an English-speaking reader.
When Dr. Apelles narrates his memories of his childhood in
Anishinaabe territory, in contrast, he leaves the Anishinaabemowin dialogue of his
father and uncle untranslated, with far fewer context clues to its content. For example, when
Apelles's uncle curses the white hunter who committed
suicide in a tree stand, he declares, "Mii geget igo giiwanaadiziwaad chimookomaanag. Gaawiin
wiikaa giwii-niisaabiiginaasiinaan," or "For sure those
white people are crazy. You'll never get him down" (190).2 However, the
non-Anishinaabemowin-speaking reader is left as ignorant of his words as
the other white hunters, for whom the uncle falsely translates, "I say it's a long way up" (190).
Similarly, when the uncle observes "Dibishkoo go gaag.
Ishpagoojing ishpiming ishkwaa nibod"--meaning "Just like a porcupine. When they die up high
they cling on and {64} get stuck there"--he translates
his words to his white interrogator as "The boy'll have to climb it" (190). Even such simple
moments as the advice of Apelles's father when Apelles lies
sick in bed as a child remain untranslated, and the words are difficult or impossible to decipher
from the English-language context (29).3 Just as Treuer
describes Betty's use of Anishinaabemowin in The Hiawatha as representing a
memory that she does not want to "violate" (Kennedy 54), this use of
Anishinaabemowin by Apelles conceals meaning that resists penetration by the nonfluent. Such
moments "must be earned by the reader" (54), a move
that resists the ornamentalization of Anishinaabemowin that the Bimaadiz and Eta sections
display. Apelles's tale-within-a-tale mimics not only
the stiff dialogue of Cooper's Indians but also their hijinks. When Gitim wants to ambush and
rape Eta,
he disguises himself as a bear, a costume so good it fools even Eta's dogs, who set upon him
(100). This scene directly recalls the bear disguise shared
by Hawkeye and Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans (266, 288); in one of the most
improbable moments from an author notorious for them, this
costume works so well that its wearer can walk unrevealed through a hostile band of Hurons.
(Presumably not wishing to be left out, Chingachgook
later disguises himself as a beaver with similar success [302]). As John D. Kalb writes in one of
Apelles's harshest reviews, the Anishinaabe characters
of these sections are consistently "Disneyesque and Cooperesque figures," "preposterous" and
"fanciful" (116). To lambaste Treuer for this as Kalb
does, however, is to miss the satire suggested by the novel's inter- and intratextual play. By
putting this Cooperesque story--and implicitly, the
destructive stereotypes authors like Cooper helped to shape--in conversation with the more
realistic narrative of Dr. Apelles, the novel again suggests
that these stories have nothing to do with the lived experiences of Anishinaabe individuals and
everything to do with Euroamerican fantasies of
Indians.4
The Bimaadiz and Eta story further invites intertextual
reading by using the classic Greek pastoral of Daphnis and Chloe as the basis of its
plot.
Apelles's tale follows the Greek original incident for incident, from the
abandonment of the children to their salvation by animal {65} mothers, from
the attempted rape of the maiden to the hero's sexual tutelage by an older woman. Though he
infuses the story with fresh language and detail, Treuer
has done little else beyond changing Greek names to Anishinaabemowin ones and adjusting the
setting accordingly. Lamon and Myrtalê, for example,
become Jiigibiig and Zhookaagiizhigookwe (12), while the oxen that save Daphnis from a
collapsing pirate ship become the moose that save Eta from
a floating brothel (180-81). Where nymphs lead Daphnis to a sunken purse of drachmas so he can
afford Chloe's hand in marriage, Bimaadiz is instead
guided by the narrator to a sunken fleet of trading canoes to fund his pursuit of Eta (239). And
just as Daphnis and Chloe are improbably reunited with
their long-lost biological parents in Longus's climactic scene, so, too, are Bimaadiz and Eta
improbably restored to their parents in the climactic
council scene of their narrative (296-300).
Treuer has argued elsewhere that the pastoral caricatures of
Daphnis and Chloe adumbrate many myths about Indigenous peoples, such as "the
myth of an educationally available Indian woman," prepared to tutor the male hero in sex--a myth
that Treuer finds perpetuated in both Laguna Pueblo
author Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams
stories (Native American Fiction 139-40). The famous innocence of
Daphnis and Chloe--who, despite their careers in animal husbandry, manage to lack the slightest
knowledge of sex--also suggests the Rousseauan
noble savage, a patronizing stereotype long used to portray the "Indian" as "safely dead and
historically past" (Berkhofer 67). By demonstrating how
easily this classic Western text can be passed off as a story of "Indian life," Apelles
again suggests the way that Euroamerican simulations of
Indigenous peoples can efface their traditions and lived experiences.
Interestingly, Daphnis and Chloe is itself a
highly metafictional text. Longus emphasizes in his foreword that his story is not original but an
ekphrastic work based on an interpreter's explanation of a "painted icon" (23). Longus insists that
his work is only a "translation" (23)--in fact, a
translation of a translation, as "the original 'work' was a living, human drama composed and
directed by the {66} god Eros" (Collins 6).
Daphnis and
Chloe returns to the image of the god of love as a narrator several times; for example,
Eros refers to the children's budding love as his "pastoral opus"
(62), while Pan warns a pirate captain that he has "dragged from sanctuary a girl whom Eros
needs as a character in a story he is now creating" (81).
This metaphor--love as narration--also resonates throughout
Apelles. In fact, Dr. Apelles openly declares it: "He can sense that there is a
connection between translation and love" (24). Love, Apelles suggests, means "translating"
oneself "into a language that someone, somewhere, will
want to read" (39); in other words, to be understood by another, Apelles must first craft a self--a
text--to present to others. As Apelles considers his
isolation, he comes to fear dying "with no one in this world left to speak him" (52). When he
does find a lover, Campaspe, she also sees him explicitly
as a text, "a pleasant torture because she longed to lift his cover and read him, to bring him home
and read him immediately and completely, and,
ultimately, to shelve him in her most private and intimate stacks" (144).
As William Gillard observes, the name "Apelles" here
recalls the fourth-century BCE Greek painter Apelles, asked by Alexander the Great to paint
the ruler's favorite concubine, named--like the heroine of Treuer's novel--Campaspe (Gillard
153). In Pliny the Elder's recounting of the story in his
Natural History, Apelles falls in love with Campaspe in the course of creating her
portrait; realizing this, Alexander presents her to the artist, retaining
only the painting (Pliny 35.36). Though Gillard reads Apelles as having "summoned into
existence by his own creative energy the object of his desire"
(153), the classical parallel does not quite suggest creation. Had Apelles been creating a loved
one from nothing, as Gillard suggests, a better referent
for Treuer's novel would have been the Pygmalion myth. Whereas Pygmalion creates a statue that
he finds superior to all mortal women, Apelles
creates a painting that helps him better see the flesh-and-blood woman who is already
there; the actual painting he gives, as promised, to Alexander.
Apelles's art thus operates not as an end in itself but as a means to achieve greater understanding
of another human.
This idea features prominently in another acknowledged
influ-{67}ence on Apelles, Italo Calvino's
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. As Treuer's
novel progresses, Apelles describes not only love but also sex in textual terms:

And even then, while she is on top of him, right before his closed eyes, and
her pubic hair is brushing against his own almost hairless groin, and
right then after so long, after waiting so long for this or something like it, he sees the translation,
the meaning available only to him, vulnerable to
him, in a language belonging only to him. The pages flutter. . . . The pages flip and fan and
flutter. And it seems to him that her breasts, as they
part and rise, are like the pages of a mysterious and delicate book. I've been waiting to read
you, he whispers. . . . And what a story it is to read.
What a pleasure. Page after page after page. (149)

This metaphor of sex as an act of reading closely echoes the imagery of If on a
Winter's Night, a book Treuer once called one of the "books one
cannot do without, books one must read to get into heaven" ("Blog"). Like Apelles, Calvino's
second-person protagonist, the Reader, becomes "an
object of reading" for his lover (the "Other Reader"), who constructs her own translation of him
as she "reads" his body:

the Other Reader is reviewing your body as if skimming the index, and at
some moments she consults it as if gripped by sudden and specific
curiosities, then she lingers, questions it and waiting till a silent answer reaches her. . . . she is not
reading you, single and whole as you are, but
using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly
partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of
her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you. (155-56)

By alluding to a text as metafictional as Calvino's, Apelles reminds the reader
once more of the interplay between stories and lived experience,
particularly the ability of the former to shape our understanding and perceptions of the latter.
More specifically, how-{68}ever, the connection again
emphasizes the need for lovers to engage one another's "constructed" or "translated" selves as a
step toward knowing one another.

Yet, in translating himself, Apelles faces an obstacle that Calvino's Reader does not: he is
Anishinaabe, and therefore he must first break free of the
text that Euroamerican culture has already written for him. As Gerald Vizenor (an Anishinaabe
critic himself) observes in his book Manifest Manners,
the histories of American Indigenous peoples have too often been overwritten by the "manifest
manners in literature," the Euroamerican narratives that
overwrite their individual existences with stereotypes and simulation (4). Treuer echoes these
concerns in his Native American Fiction: "Native
Americans, more so than any other group, are experienced through image and text and story more
so than through shared, lived experience" (4).
Borrowing a phrase from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, he describes how
"Indians" become "a playground for the imagination" (113; Morrison
38), "ghosts" over which American culture writes a variety of romantic and demeaning stories
(73). Dr. Apelles embodies these concerns of an
individual identity being lost to Euroamerican simulations: "he, and all those like him, were
measured against the stories that were told about Indians
by those who did not know Indians" (Apelles 133). In the face of these stories,
Apelles feels like "a little ghost in living colors," robbed of his own
reality (205).
Rather than profit by romantic stereotypes, Apelles finds it
easier to avoid discussion of his culture and his reservation past:

He was not one of those professional Indians who were willing to dispense
platitudes disguised as cultural treasure. He was not one of those for
whom the past, because of how exotic it seemed to most people, could be used as social credit
among the credulous or liberal. He was a private
man, with private sorrows. (133)

Even when his lover presses him about his past, Apelles fears that he cannot tell his life story
without performing a stereotypical Indian identity, like
the light-skinned "Indian" author who dutifully trots out his "rez" stories on a book tour (212). To
do so would be to "give {69} up that sovereign part
of himself," to cease to be Apelles and only be another "Indian" (204):

his life was real to him, and if he told it in the wrong way or for the wrong
reasons it would cease to be real, it would no longer be his life
because it would become a story like all the other stories about his people, and if he told it he
would only become a character in that story and
would be only the Indian they knew and the Indian they told their friends about. (203)

This fear of being "overwritten" cripples Apelles's life to the degree that he avoids even
casual conversation with the hostess at his favorite restaurant:
"Dr. Apelles never said anything to Zola except good evening or hello or thank you because to
say more would lead to a discussion of these other
things that he could not say, and the long string of his life would unravel" (201).
In light of these passages, the story of Bimaadiz and Eta is
not, as some reviewers have suggested, a simple parallel to the story of Apelles and
Campaspe, mirroring a twenty-first-century love with a fantasy of the nineteenth. Rather, the
pastoral romance acts as an obstacle to the love of
Apelles and Campaspe, its stereotypes threatening Apelles's ability for self-definition. For all the
charms of its story--or perhaps because of them--this
fairy-tale simulation of Indian life becomes the true villain of the novel, a "valentine that seeks to
trap [Apelles]" and from which he must "spring clear"
by creating his own, oppositional story (Treuer, "Blog").
In fashioning this story, however, Apelles must first work
through a variety of Euroamerican models. As the narrator, Apelles consistently struggles
to find a "language" or style for himself, as Campaspe herself notes at the book's close: "I was
wondering why each section sounded so different"
(312). ("That's so good of you to notice that," Apelles replies [312]). Apelles's sections are,
appropriately, a mélange of styles, as he combines various
influences to create a personal voice. These chapters are also richly intertextual, alluding to
works ranging from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ("it
is a truth universally acknowledged that . . . " [Apelles 49; cf. Austen 5]) to
Nabokov's Lolita ("a little ghost in living colors" [Apelles {70} 205; cf.
Nabokov 14, qtd. in Blumenkranz]). Apelles quotes Flaubert (80), names the hostess of his
restaurant "Zola" (36), and, as Douglas Robinson
observes, even hides a reference to the contemporary Pakistani author Moshin Hamid
(Apelles 135).
In reviewing his own work, Apelles notes his variety of
styles, reflecting that "the dream and everything leading up to it felt dusty and starched,
English, the scenes of his early affair with the girl at the round dance hall had something French,
something simple-hearted about it, while his boyhood
had the hard cast of Hemingway" (79). An ironic English tone runs throughout one of the novel's
early chapters, which are laced with sentences like
"we mention it with no small amount of apprehension given the typically high standards of the
reading public" (70). Two chapters later, Apelles turns
to the lengthy compound sentences of Ernest Hemingway:

He saw his boots standing at attention at the foot of the bed and saw the
front steps littered with wood chips and smelling like fresh-split
jackpine, and he saw the narrow trail down to the milkshed, and he saw very clearly the pine slab
of the shed itself, scored with teeth marks by
the cows during the winter, and then he saw the cows themselves who looked at him
reproachfully, and the bucket with a rind of dried milk at
the rim. (197)

When Robinson criticizes the novel for being
"Sternean-cute" for its three-page sigh, then, he is in large part missing the point. If Apelles is too
"cute" at one moment and at the next "puckish . . . like the narrator of a Victorian novel"
(Robinson), it is because Apelles is at first overwhelmed by
the three archetypal Western styles--English, French, and Hemingway-esque--that he attempts to
master. Following a nightmare of whirling books that
literalizes this anxiety, Apelles realizes that he has "no control over the text, texture, or images
through which he was being pushed. It seemed very
important that he find a way to control those styles" (80).
Yet Apelles appears to achieve self-realization not by
adopting these styles but by transcending them. In his final chapters, the imitative voice
disappears, breaking into a fragmentary style that {71}
Apelles seems to consider a more accurate self-reflection: "All his habits and thoughts and
styles, the ponderous words that were so heavy in his mind, have dropped away. He can see
them. They are spent and cracked and tumble away in
space behind him. The rules are different here" (268).
By learning to position himself relative to the styles of these
canonical authors, Apelles has by implication learned to position himself vis-à-vis the
racist underpinnings of their texts--the imperialism of Mansfield Park (Said 80-96),
for example, or the "primitivization" of Hemingway's tribeless
Indians (Meyers). The scene with the dead hunter, for example, can be read as an inversion-- and
subversion--of Hemingway's "Indian Camp"; rather
than Nick Adams's father taking him to encounter death in the form of a frightening and
exoticized "Indian" suicide, Apelles's father takes him to
encounter death in the form of a frightening and exoticized white suicide (Treuer, "E-mail").
Apelles used these styles, he tells Campaspe, only because
"I did not yet know who I was. I had no language for myself " (312). However, like
Vizenor's "postindian warrior" who finds her survivance by fashioning resistant, performative
simulations of her own (5), Apelles overcomes the
"manifest manners" of his literary antecedents through "narrative recreation" of his own identity.
By reshaping these influences and ultimately
transcending them, Apelles is at last prepared to tell his own story and, therefore, prepared to
love.
"It was a time of war but that is over now," Apelles declares
in his final chapter (314); the "battle inside him" (268), the war of stories, stereotypes,
and styles, has--for now--been resolved. While at the beginning of the novel the word "love" has
"lost its meaning" (1), distorted by dehumanizing
portrayals of the Anishinaabe, at the novel's end, Apelles can turn to his reflection and whisper "I
love you" (315). The "love story" that gives Apelles
its subtitle, then, is every bit as much the story of Apelles learning to love himself as learning to
love Campaspe. Rather than parroting Flaubert or
Hemingway, Apelles's language is finally "his own," leaving him in a space where "he needs no
other readers" (315). Escaping what he calls the "mere
fairy tale" of Bimaadiz and Eta, Apelles has learned to trans-{72}late himself and found a "much better," more genuine love
(315), winning his most
important victory.

NOTES

I am greatly indebted to Michael Wilson for his feedback and
encouragement on multiple drafts of this manuscript, to David Treuer for his helpfulness and
alacrity in answering my
translation questions, and, as always, to my wife Angela for her constant support.
1. For purposes of this article, I will be using
Indian in Gerald Vizenor's sense, referring to the genericized, "unreal construct of
white colonialism, a stereotype that blocks authentic
native survivance" (Kroeber 27), rather than to Indigenous peoples themselves.
2. The loose translations of this paragraph were provided by
Treuer via e-mail.
3. "Gego babaamamaazikaaken. Bizaan dana gosha," which
translates roughly to "Don't move around. Be still for crying out loud."
4. For further discussion of Cooper's role in shaping
Euroamerican simulations of Indigenous peoples, see, for example, Vizenor (8), Davis, and
Edgerton.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Vintage,
2007. Print.

Berkhofer, Robert. The White Man's Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Random House, 1978. Print.

Another Indian
Looking Back
A Review Essay on Recent American Indian Poetry

ROBERT DALE PARKER

In a poem late in Sara Littlecrow-Russell's The Secret Powers of Naming, the
speaker (implicitly the poet), dressed up for work, takes a lunch break.
She sees a homeless man and gives him her Diet Coke money, but she doesn't "want to look at
him." And "He doesn't want to look at me either." Or at
least, so she supposes. Then she explains, in the poem's closing words, that "Neither of us wants
to see another Indian looking back" (68). What can or
dare an Indian or an Indian poet see, or want to see, or fear to see in the mirroring gaze of another
Indian or of another Indian poet?
Littlecrow-Russell, an Ojibwe and, as a young lawyer, a self-confessed new admittee to what she
calls the "Sue Tribe" (61), fears seeing "Indian ruins"
(5), "Americanus Worthless" (6). She also fears not seeing Indian ruins. She has something to
lose, and she supposes that the homeless man, no matter
how worthless in the eyes of others and even, to a degree, in her own shamed eyes, still has
enough pride to feel his failure lit up by her lawyerly,
lipsticked, and "starched white" (68) reflection. But even as she denies looking and spoofs her
fear of looking, she must have looked, or she wouldn't
see what she writes about. And she must have wanted to look.
Especially when, like Littlecrow-Russell, you are away from
home and stumble on an unexpected reflection, then wanting to look and not wanting
to look describe poles of possibility for Indian thinking, Indian vision, Indian poetry. Some poets,
like Sherman Alexie and Adrian C. Louis, gaze
steadily at the degradations of Indian life, mediating degradation with affection and humor.
Others, such as {76} Simon Ortiz or Joy Harjo, gaze at
the
degradations but build on them to point their gaze at Indian people in other ways. Still others,
like Jim Barnes, Carter Revard, and Louise Erdrich,
gaze at Indians but gaze as variously in less specifically Indian directions. Yet more Indian poets,
such as Luci Tapahonso and Kimberly Blaeser, fasten
their eyes on Indians but without staring at suffering and degradation so much as they look
lyrically, in calmly celebratory ways, at family and
emotional connections and continuities.
In National Monuments, Heid E. Erdrich
(Ojibwe), the most conspicuously literary and allusive of the poets considered here, ricochets
many of her
poems off other texts, whether articles from the daily news or earlier poets (national monuments,
of a sort) from Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Walt
Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens to William Carlos Williams. In one
series of poems, she spins variations on Williams's "To
Elsie," the poem that famously begins "The pure products of America / go crazy" and then settles
on Elsie, Williams's fifteen-year-old servant:

Unlike Williams, Erdrich has her Elsie reflect on her own desolation: "Like most girls, Elsie
avoided the mirror." But then, in a restroom mirror, she
catches her reflection reflecting itself in another mirror in an endless series and sees herself
"Connected in all directions," not a pure product but "a
walking picture of infinity" (25). Amid so many recursive possibilities, the doubleness of
reflection, the double bind of looking and being looked at,
dissipates into what, in the title of her poem, Erdrich calls "Infinite Progression." No longer
constrained to her role as Williams's servant, Erdrich's
Elsie eventually {77} imitates her boss. She finds one of
Williams's prescription pads and, having seen Williams write poetry on them, in a moment of
improvisation she too starts writing poetry on the prescription pad. Soon she has to buy more
paper--a Big Chief tablet, of course, for Erdrich keeps
an eye on popular culture as well as on elite literary culture-- and she "writes, and writes,
straddles a canon, makes a name" (37).
For Erdrich, then, in these and other poems, Indians have
long since tired of playing barbarian to Euroamericans' desperate craving to define
themselves as mirror images of a threatening Other. Indians do not need to be the solution to
Euroamerican doubt. Indians "know what has become of
you, who needed us. . . . / But what was it we once solved?" and "Who asked the question?" (17).
Erdrich wants to ask the questions, not just observe
the likes of Robert Frost and his cohort asking and answering their own questions. She rewrites
Frost's celebrated "The Gift Outright," a classic of
what many readers suppose to be American self-definition, especially since Frost recited his
poem at John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration.
Frost's poem begins "The land was ours before we were the land's" and then goes on to proclaim
how "we" became the land's:

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become. (316)

In her own poem, called "The Theft Outright," Erdrich responds to Frost and to the dominant
ways of thinking that Frost's poem so suggestively
represents. Her "we," it turns out, is not Frost's "we":

We were the land's before we were.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Such as we were we gave most things outright
(the deed of theft was many deeds and leases and claim
stakes . . .)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The land, not the least vaguely, realizing in all four
directions,
still storied, art-filled, fully enhanced.
Such as she is, such as she wills us to become. (31-32)

{78} For Erdrich, as for Frost, the land is feminine.
But for Erdrich the land is not the passive object of Euroamerican manipulation, not feminine in
that colonialist sense. Instead, like Erdrich's Elsie, it has agency, and it has its agency not in
Frost's past or future ("was" or "would") but instead in the
ongoing present ("is," "wills").
Most of the poets considered in this essay take for granted
the agency that Erdrich reinvents. As they look to the past or the present, they look
without the fear of shamed recognition that haunts Littlecrow-Russell, or they look in denial of it.
These are not poets who dwell on the failures of
Indian people, as some readers have suggested that Alexie and Adrian Louis do. But their
celebrations of heritage suggest their awareness of the
demons that haunt writers like Alexie, Louis, and Littlecrow-Russell. They often find their
antidote to those demons in critiques of popular
touchstones, like Erdrich's spoof of the Land O'Lakes butter maiden, or in family, like Cheryl
Savageau's and Kimberly Blaeser's anchoring of their
poems in family objects and recollections. Or they center their thinking in the continuities and
histories of ongoing Native languages, like the many
Indian writers who reinflect their English writing with the familiar vocabulary of their Native
language or who actually write in their Native language,
like Philip Carroll Morgan and, especially, like Ofelia Zepeda, a Tohono O'odham linguist, who,
with Ray Young Bear, stand out by integrating
Native-language poetry with English-language poetry.
Such connections and continuities can also come in the
form of the language and poetry, as when Blaeser turns to documentary. In a long
poem
called "Housing Conditions of One Hundred Fifty Chippewa Families" in Apprenticed to
Justice, Blaeser, an Ojibwe from White Earth, draws on
Sister M. Inez Hilger's Chippewa Families: A Social Study of White Earth Reservation,
1938. Blaeser begins with the concrete empiricism of a list of
nouns--"wigwam / peaked lodge / bark house / tipi / log house / tar-paper shack / frame house /
u.s. rehabilitation house"--documenting the dwellings
that Hilger counted at White Earth but also documenting, staring back at and staring down,
Hilger's version of a documentary gaze. Blaeser uses italics
to signal Hilger's exact words:

Blaeser does not oppose documentary. Instead, she proposes a competing model or
epistemology of documentary. It is not about whether you notice
empirical details. It is about how you notice them and which details you notice. The
well-intentioned but naïve social scientist quantifies what she sees
as loss or failure without seeing how a house looks to people who see it as home, as endaayaang.
For Blaeser, then, the impersonal 1938 of Hilger's
would-be empiricist title begs for translation into another, more personal empiricist vocabulary: it
is the year Blaeser's mother turned five while living
in what Hilger sees as a junkyard of "SOCIAL PROBLEMS." Hilger puzzles over
the way the people actually like their homes and "were quite
unwilling to leave them" (81), thus recording and making interpretable--as a good
empiricist should--what she does not know how to interpret, what
the light cast by her style of empiricism will not let her see. {80}
In "What They Did by Lamplight," Blaeser musters the
understated, documentary lyricism of a verbal catalog. The poem consists of a list of what
women did by lamplight in the homes that Hilger quantified--and as if to intensify the lyrical
reification, the concreteness, Blaeser breaks the lines into
the visual pattern of a lamp. Inside their homes, the women "Clean rice, hand stitch / make pies,
roll jingles [for jingle skirts] / patch jeans, shake dice /
clean fish, roll cigarettes / read from The Farmer. / Braid rugs, mend nets, tell
stories / write letters, bead, cut quilt squares," and so on through
"laugh," "depill sweaters," "make soap," "Change diapers, shuck corn," "crochet doilies," "dance
together / nurse their babies," and "remember their
dead" (95). Blaeser takes up none of Littlecrow-Russell's dance of should she or shouldn't she
look at other Indians or at Indians' actual or potential
reflections of each other. Writing about home, about what she knows, and not, like
Littlecrow-Russell, about the cognitive ambush of an unexpected
encounter, Blaeser cannot imagine not looking and cannot imagine fearing to look. For Blaeser,
home is home, with a directness that her documentary
form crafts as if it were self-evident. But if it were self-evident, then well-intentioned social
scientists would never miscast the homes of the
colonized--troubled though they might sometimes be--as the detritus of conquest.
Phillip Carroll Morgan's The Fork-in-the-Road Indian
Poetry Store has the general-store jumble of poems that its title suggests, but it also has an
understated consistency, as many of the poems stand out for their readiness to experiment with
poetic form. In "The Story of the Seeds," Morgan
begins with a two-column prologue. The left column sets the scene in primordial chaos when (in
the opening words) "the earth was a muddy
quagmire." Meanwhile, the right column lifts the curtain to expose the poet's nervous self-doubt:
"will my audience / scoff a woman / saying hmphh"
(82). The rest of the poem mirrors the prologue's multiplicity by braiding three stories. The first
story tells of a sixteenth-century southeastern Indian
running in terror from the brutal onslaught of Hernando de Soto. At one point, he finds a moment
of reassurance by drinking {81} water from the
dipper gourd he carries tied to his sash. As he and his cousin flee, they carry the seeds of their
heritage and their future, seeds of the dipper gourd, vine
beans, squash, pumpkin, and corn. One night, he tells the second story, an ancient tale of the
great flood and the prophet who survives it. In the third
story, the poet (or his likeness) drives his pickup in the Oklahoma Choctaw present and listens to
a coyote wail with jealousy over a dog that "took up
the territory / around" the poet's cabin (92). The poet, like the seed carrier, is a node of past,
present, and future. "[M]y neighbor the wheat farmer,"
he tells us,

asked me why i grow gourds which I cannot eat raising an eyebrow i did not answer why do you go to church i asked him? to worship god he replied that's why i grow gourds i said (94)

Framed by the self-doubt in the prologue's echo chamber, Morgan's braiding of the present
with the ancient past and the historical past passes the
tire-kicking test that makes it, like his pickup or his dog, part of ordinary life.
Morgan's play with form takes many forms. Sometimes he
comments on his own poem in poetic footnotes. Suddenly, in the midst of a plainspoken
poem called "Fried Rabbit," a footnote interrupts the poem and itself takes a dramatically
different form, still poetic but this time in rhymed and
roughly metered lines (at first even in iambic pentameter) that themselves address form:

if romance could be bought in packaged form
what would the price tag be on an approaching storm
that mellows the sky over a rabbit feast after a solitary day of work and peace

Whatever the price, he concludes, "i'll pay i'll go" (118).
Morgan has a way of finding the lyrical in the ordinary and
transforming its form:

{82}
ochre hole of urine two
feet deep in snowshoe
rabbit tracks a pause
to pee in winter's claws
and hear a breeze cause
laden trees to crack
then chase a grouse who
flapped and fluttered flew
the silence snapped raw
drought of freezing air paws
the frightened quarry through
bright narcotic slack (31)

Part of the lyricism, sifted through the delicate rhyme stretched across the stanzas, comes in
the parallel stretching of speculation. The poet does not
know what happened. He may reasonably enough surmise, and perceptively, that the hole comes
from rabbit urine--a wonderfully unlikely and
mundane topic--but he does not know that the snowshoe hare listened to the breeze crack the
trees (as the internal rhyme runs with the end-line rhyme
and with the assonance of deep and pee), still less that the hare
stopped purposefully to listen. He does not know that the rabbit chased a grouse, still
less how the grouse responded--unless, unmentioned but in tune with the understatement of the
poem and such nearly rhyming repetition as pause and
paws, he sees those tracks too. Here documentary drops away and the description,
ostensibly of the past, paints the poet's own imagination in the
present.
As Morgan braids the past with the present and the
quotidian or earthy with the lyrical, each reinflecting the other, so Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki)
ponders the call of the old ways and the easy appeal of the new in a poem called, simply enough,
"Tradition." She remembers how her mother taught
her a precise pattern for making apple pies. Now, twenty years later, they are making pies
together again, and her mother is astonished at Savageau's
careful deliberation. Impatiently, her mother gives up waiting for Savageau to finish {83} and, oblivious to the remembered pattern and "without
ceremony," she abruptly "dumps," "spreads," "mixes," "and pours"everything "in a heap" and
puts an end to it, an end to what Savageau had taken
almost as sacred ceremony and tradition. "That's the thing with tradition," Savageau decides.
"Even now, peeling apples for pie, / I'm looking over my
own / shoulder, wondering" (61). Left to sort out the fate of tradition in a world that at once
belittles, underestimates, and romanticizes Indians'
connection with the past, she finds no easy solution. She cannot gaze at tradition with any more
assurance than Littlecrow-Russell can gaze at the
unexpected fellow but fallen Indian. Her glance might yield recognition, but it might just as well
reveal that she sees what she looks for or that she
keeps herself from seeing her own reflection or her own future.
In another poem, "Side Pass," Savageau goes to her father's
wake and sees again the boy she had a crush on when she was fifteen and he played
basketball under her father's coaching. She is amazed at how utterly unattractive she finds the
once curly-haired heartthrob. And yet she inexplicably
feels the aching tug of what her old boyfriend was so long ago and what she has now lost. She
remembers her father teaching the boys how to look in
one direction and pass in another. "I would fall in love again," she concludes, "if it would save
me from this grief " (96). She cannot look one way and
pass the other way, but just to hazard the idea, even momentarily, is a means of working through
and living on with the multiplicity of directions that
tug at us across time and memory. Similarly, in "Heart," she watches a bird fly through a cottage
"from window to window / never staying in / never
staying out" (136). The heart that is a home pumps in and out, over and over, like tradition and
change, worth romanticizing, if at all, perhaps only in
its impermeability to the romanticizing that Indians are pressured to impose on it.
In Where Clouds Are Formed, Ofelia Zepeda's
poetry somehow seems to escape the questions that haunt the other poets under discussion here.
She writes of the desert, clouds, water, fog, rain. She writes of weather. In "The Place Where
Clouds Are Formed,"

{84}
Every day it is the same.
He comes home.
He tells her about it.
As he speaks, his breath condenses in front of his face.
She goes about her business;
every now and then she looks over.
She doesn't hear his voice.
She sees the soft fog that continues to form a halo. (3)

Subject verb, subject verb. Every day it is the same. Almost every line it is the same, at least
for awhile: It is. He comes. He tells. He speaks. His breath
condenses. She goes. He looks. Then, for a moment, she doesn't hear, but then again she sees.
Zepeda's poems seem to have little use for the agonies
of subject versus object that agitate or energize so many other Native American poets and, in
other ways, so many poets in general. Her poems do not
typically fear looking or even being looked at or worry over the oscillation between opposites.
They do not worry over how the present sifts through
tradition and the past. They watch the weather, the mist, the clouds. The children at the end of
"The Place Where Clouds Are Formed" sit with their
father in the warm cab of his truck surrounded by the cold as they wait for their school bus. We
never see the school bus arrive and take them to the
land of oscillating opposites. Instead, we see their breath condense on the cold windshield as they
sit in the cocoon, the air pocket, of family closeness.
And yet, much as clouds form, clouds also change. They change constantly. Many readers take
Zepeda's poems as paeans to a lyrically lost past. But
Zepeda is a linguist whose study of her Tohono O'odham language not only records the
language's past but also tries to help shape its future. Her
poems may seem to separate their slow, thoughtful rhythms from the chaos of contemporaneity,
but the remarkable patience in their evocations of
evanescent space and place are themselves an index of, a mirage against, the conflicts that
Zepeda's colleague-poets record more directly.
In "Pain of Speaking," a character voiced by Zepeda laments
that she does not know her grandmother's language. When she hears her
grandmother's people talking, she thinks:

{85}
Sometimes just by the rhythm
I know they are talking about me.
Right in front of me!
Having no voice in this language
makes me invisible.
It hurts.
I scream!
They look at me.
Guilty. (63)

It seems that this speaker is--or thinks she is--guilty, but the fog of guilt settles on "them" as
well as on "me." When they look, the sense of panicky
vulnerability, of each gaze exposed by its own gaze reflected back, echoes the panicky gaze that
Littlecrow-Russell describes in her far different voice.
Zepeda's poetry links opposites through likeness as well as through difference. In that way it
offers not only a metaphor for the continuities with an
earlier era that readers often associate with her poems of the outdoors, the desert, the clouds, and
the rain but also a metaphor for the shared
questioning that ties together much of the vast range of contemporary American Indian
poetry.

Titu Cusi Yupanqui. An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru. Trans. Ralph
Bauer. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2005. ISBN 087081821X. 166 pp. Jonathan D. Steigman, United
States Military Academy

With the first English translation of the account of Titu Cusi Yupanqui, English professor
Ralph Bauer gives us a view of the Spanish conquest of Peru
from a Native perspective. Bauer provides an excellent introduction that situates the work within
its historical and cultural context. Through the
introduction and copious explanatory endnotes, the reader gains a real understanding of the
hybrid nature of the text, a result of the process of its
composition.
Titu Cusi Yupanqui was the next-to-last Native ruler of the
Inca Empire. Considered by the Spanish authorities to be in a state of rebellion against
the colonial government after inheriting the throne from his father, the rebellious native leader
Manco Inca, Titu Cusi composes his work, a letter to
the Spanish sovereign Philip II enumerating Spanish atrocities in Peru, from the jungle refuge of
Vilcabamba in 1570. He tells his story in his native
Quechua to the Augustinian missionary, fray Marcos García, who translated it into
Spanish. It was then transcribed by Martín de Pando, Titu Cusi's
mestizo secretary, thus contributing to the hybrid nature of the work. As Bauer points out, both
Andean and Spanish influences are present in the text.
He notes that García exerted some influence over the composition process because "the
Spanish missionary 'ordered' and translated it into Spanish"
(12). {87}
Bauer notes that the document is more than just an appeal to
Philip II to take control of the situation in Peru and to put an end to Spanish abuses; it
is also a subtle form of Native resistance against Spanish rule:

Aware that their clubs, pikes, and slingshots were largely ineffective against
the armored and mounted Spanish conquistadors, Native leaders
soon learned to appropriate not only the foreigners' use of swords, firearms, and horses but also
the most powerful weapon that the invaders had
brought: the written word. The text presented here tells an early chapter in the long history of
Native appropriations of this European medium.
(18)

Titu Cusi not only appropriates the written word
generally but also chooses a specific format for his appeal to the crown: the "relación"
(account).
Bauer tells us that this is a form of legal discourse with origins in notarial rhetoric. It is intended
to present an eyewitness account within the context of
a legal dispute, and it relies upon firsthand experience for its authority. The rhetorical style of the
"relación" also becomes a historiographic text, in
addition to a legal deposition designed to influence official policy and legislation. Titu Cusi's
approach demonstrates a profound understanding on his
part of the modes of European discourse that he appropriates to pursue his goals of more a
humane colonial system, providing a means by which he
might return from internal exile. Bauer shows that Cusi's work is typical of sixteenth century
scholastic political philosophy, similar in style to the
rhetorical contributions of Indigenous rights advocates Francisco de Vitoria y Bartolomé
de las Casas. Titu Cusi's account lends specificity to the work
of las Casas, pointing out that burdens imposed by the neofeudal rulers of Peru were responsible
for the decline of the Native population. Having
converted to Catholicism, Titu Cusi portrays himself in a way that is similar to the rhetorical
style of las Casas, as a Christian prince, the "natural" ruler
of the land who is voluntarily placing himself under the authority of Philip II, according to
Bauer.
We also learn from Bauer's introduction that the account is a
{88} political document as well as a literary work. It is a
petition from Titu Cusi to
Philip II intended to initiate a negotiation process designed to end the Inca rebellion against
Spanish authority. Titu Cusi's goal is to end hostilities and
gain an estate and pension for himself. His mission was ultimately unsuccessful, but his attempt
at reaching accommodation with the Spanish
government has left us with a document that provides an excellent resource for anyone interested
in early transatlantic cultural contact and the early
Spanish-American colonial period. Cast in the style of the two categories of Incan oral history,
the "life history" and "genealogical narrative" (35), the
text contains three sections. Part 1 is a letter addressed to the governor of Peru, Lope
García de Castro. In this "instrucción," Titu Cusi requests that
the governor take the account to Spain and present it to Philip II. In this section, the author
attempts to justify his position as rightful ruler of the Inca
civilization by providing a "genealogical narrative" of his family in the Incan oral tradition (35).
Part 2, his account of the conquest, is the "life history"
part of the narrative because he recounts the events from the perspective of his father's family.
The emphasis is on the actions of Manco Inca,
particularly in regard to his interactions with the Spanish conquerors. Through the use of these
two Andean rhetorical styles, Titu Cusi hopes to gain
the recognition from the Spanish authorities that he seeks. One important aspect of this section of
the text is that it provides details about Manco Inca's
life in exile in Vilcabamba that are not available anywhere else. Another important point in this
section is Titu Cusi's description of his conversion to
Christianity, a means by which he hopes to bring more legitimacy to his status. Part 3 is a legal
document granting García de Castro the authority to
negotiate Titu Cusi's return from exile.
Although Spanish versions of the text have been available to
researchers for a number of years, this is the first English translation of the full text.
Bauer's extensive knowledge of the work is evident in the introduction and explanatory endnotes
he provides. He succeeds in contextualizing the text
within the framework of recent scholarship on Spanish-language texts written from an Andean
perspective: "In particular, the chronicles written by
Juan de Betanzos {89}. . . Pedro Cieza de León,
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, and . . . the mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega contain valuable
comments about Inca historiographic practices that help us to reconstruct the traditions on which
Titu Cusi would have drawn when telling his history
of the conquest" (26). The quality of the translation is excellent and accessible to scholars and
nonscholars alike. Bauer's introduction, his notes, his
explanation of the hybrid nature of the document, the glossary of Quechua and Spanish words he
provides, and the detailed index all combine to make
this text an excellent resource for archaeologists, historians, Latin Americanists, and scholars of
Latin American literature, as well as the general reader
with an interest in the history of the Andean region.

Pii zhinoomooiyangid ezhi-agawaatesidaaendamodiwaad
gekinomagaazibimaadiziyaang. When she shows us how they cast shadows of sadness on
one another, we become students of life. If only one line was an acceptable review of Louise
Erdrich's new novel, Shadow Tag. Her latest contribution
to American literature is best described by the compound, transitive, reflexive verbs of the
Ojibwe language. It deserves a phrase laden with wide-open
vowels tumbling over one another barely held together by consonants. It needs a description that
erases the specific and focuses on acts exchanged
between subjects and the audience. But this is America, and you are reading a literary journal,
and so more must be said.
These days it has become important to pause and determine
in what ways some novels, by some authors, are Native, American, Indian, or perhaps
even stem from tribally specific roots. Shadow Tag is undeniably contemporary
American literature. It is the story of a postindustrial nuclear family
disassembling despite attempts to give up alcohol and seek psychological advice. It is a tale
broadly influenced by its time. With characters named for
continents, quo-{90}tations from iconic American author
F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a tie to the same Lead Belly blues, it is wrought in close connection
to the literature of these United States. Any reader native to America will recognize the
technological society activist, poet, and songwriter John
Trudell describes as one comprised of "nihilistic desires, civil lies gone insane" (54). Shadow Tag is also an Indian novel, in the
best sense of that word recently reclaimed by many, including the main characters, Irene and Gil,
who
listened to "dot-Indian" sitar music sometimes and their own "feather-Indian" music too (175).
They are modern mixed-blood characters who publicly
argue about their status as enrollees, and privately mourn their inability to "be Indian enough."
Gil is the son of a Vietnam veteran. Irene is the
daughter of AIM activists. They are representations and re-presenters of American Indian culture.
They are both bound by ethnicity and directly
benefit from its misunderstanding. Gil is an Indian artist, and Irene is an Indian maid. Their
trades are icons for consumption in a world in which being
Indian is no longer as easy as it once was.
The novel is also clearly connected to the
Ojibwe/Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes and woodlands. Ojibwe literature takes many
forms. There
are the old-time oral tales told entirely in the language, something like Tommy Stillday's
"Bajaaganish miinawaa Makizinish." These of course have
direct descendants, their English translations. Modern updates to these stories might be the
stepchildren of blended narratives. The rangy mixed-blood
children of the present, an accurate description of many of Erdrich's novels, are Ojibwe tales of
the present told first and only in English without
apology, because that is the way of the world today. Last of all, some dare to whisper of a future
where the stories circle back to the language and are
told again first in Ojibwe, with more pronouns than possible in English and complete disregard
for the noun. Shadow Tag is one of the
mixed-bloods--a novel straddling two worldviews, not written in the tightly packed, alternate
syntax of a verb-based language, but clearly dancing
capably around themes that are Ojibwe.
If a son in love with hockey does not scream "Ojibwe novel"
to every reader, the mention of wiindigos and the unfolding of events {91} during the
harshest months should be a clue. Wiindigos are selfish, cannibalistic, wicked creatures who are
considered sometimes intentionally murderous,
sometimes criminally insane, sometimes masochistic and suicidal. Stories of them vary, and the
wise do not mention them often. They are not unique
to the stories of Erdrich. Basil Johnston, Anne Dunn, Gerald Vizenor, Tomson Highway, Alanis
King, Joseph Boyden, and many others who write
from an Ojibwe/Anishinaabe perspective have included them in their cautionary tales. They are
classic characters of the Anishinaabe. Most importantly,
for those paying attention, they teach lessons. Irene recalls the stories told by elders about the
winter demons, but the very title of the book brings the
wiindigo into the present. As Irene, Gil, and the children chase one another's shadows, they act
out the crime of extinction, playing wiindigo in the
shadows of one another's souls.
The other subtle signal that this is a novel based near vast
inland seas and the continent's most powerful river (the Mchiziibi/Mississippi) is the
sinister role played by water. Water should be a source of life, a beloved acknowledgment of
renewal. However, from the East, one can see the West,
and for all the maternal notions of sustenance and vitality, there are dark pools of excess and loss
of control. Consider the quiet reflections of Gil, who
thinks of his sleeping wife, "her unconsciousness was sweet" as "he let himself drift on the tide
of her breathing." Later, as a fight winds to a close, Gil
is sweaty and his mind "swims." Irene, whose name invokes a song about drowning, is asked by
her daughter during a skating outing, "could you save
me if I fell in?" "I could save anyone," Irene replies (102). As the reader, you'll have to wait until
the end to decide whether or not you believe her.
Several of Erdrich's novels echo this theme of dangerous waters. It is one that connects the new
stories to the old, the Oshki-Anishinaabeg to the
Gete-Anishinaabeg. It is one of the ways we recognize stories of this place. They speak of life in
a particular place and explain how best to live and
how not to die.
Less tribally specific are the references to images and
alternate identities. Mothers who stand motionless until the school bus disappears can be
found on every weekday corner. The artist George Cat-{92}lin roamed the West looking for subjects, and as this novel
unfolds, so does the tale of
portraits and souls. In a universe that parallels the one in which Irene is placed repeatedly on
canvas, readers are reminded of stories of silence and
submission that occurred during the era of the "vanishing American." Like the game of shadow
tag, Indian identity in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries became something to chase and guard. Erdrich includes as one example an old word for
mirror, "waabaamoojichaagwan," a thing in which a
soul can be seen. What might it mean to see in a flat place of icy glass something that should not
be visible? This conflict between what we see, what
we know, and what portion of the two we acknowledge is the central tangle of the novel. Shadow Tag takes its place in the family of
Erdrich stories, and like the others, it is a complex narrative and philosophy with polished agates
of
prose lying nearly hidden upon a beach of shocking raw humanity. In this case the primary
characters are a marriage and a family, and reader beware,
the two are not one and the same. The supporting cast consists of a woman, a man, and three
children alternately arching toward adulthood and
clinging to innocence. The moral of the story is found not in the ending, but back at the
beginning, after the ending has been made clear. It is a story
about boundaries and identity and how one cannot exist without the other. Peripherally, it is also
about how these issues, of boundaries and identity,
are peculiarly complicated in American Indian communities. These are not new themes for
Erdrich, but they are approached with a new focus.
The biographies of Irene America and her husband Gil are
webs of identity woven over patches of loss. Both were raised by their mother alone.
Irene's mother, Winnie Jane, is Ojibwe and lost her original name when someone long ago
married a voyageur named Sourcier. Irene's own surname,
considered more "Indian" by many, but really not Ojibwe at all, was given to her by her father,
Calvin American Horse, a mixed-blood Dakota AIM
activist who moved on when she was young. Irene is comfortable in her urban Indian identity, but
the cultural past occasionally haunts her and the task
of being a contemporary American Indian wife becomes too much {93} to bear. Her only connection to the Ojibwe language are
random phrases
including "g'debwe" and "geget igo," which she uses with ease although she confesses that she
actually remembers almost none of the Ojibwe she had
been taught. She knows this is not her fault and is willing to gather words as they come to her,
hoping one day they may coalesce into knowing. In
contrast to Irene's mother, Gil's mother was white and his father, Gilbert Florian LaRose, was
likely a member of the Crow Tribe, living on the
Apsaalooke Nation. Gil was raised in Billings, but he recalls the funeral of his father and the
eagle feather he was handed without explanation. Irene
and Gil are of the pantribal generation whose parents somehow survived reorganization and
termination. Empowered by the American Indian
Movement, and both with access to college, they represent postcolonial urban Indians of today.
Gil has become famous painting Irene as an
ever-changing series of Native womanhood. Irene is a busy mother of three still balancing a need
to read and research, attempting to weave her own
academic dreams into a world of posing for Gil and running household errands.
The novel is Erdrich's typical equation of subplots and
relationships colliding across time and space. Siblings are discovered, souls are searched,
much wine is consumed and then forsworn. Some are born and some die. Amid this usual swirl
of storytelling, a man and a woman attempt to move
forward but clearly lose their way. Early in the book the husband and wife exchange a phrase she
has written that he later reads, "I think I'm going to
lose my mind over what I am doing" (6-7, 12). Although the exact line is later let go, the question
of what it means to lose, and specifically to lose
one's mind, echoes throughout the book. What they never come to realize is the need to find their
individual identities in order to survive. What they
spend the novel chasing instead is a combined identity as husband and wife. Gil admits, "He was
pretty sure she had married him for his art and then
slowly found that his art was no fun to live with" (13). He paints her in both precious and
pornographic poses. He arranges her with no thought of
anything other than the portrait, his portrayal of her life. He never asks, "How would you like to
be painted?" He asks her to hold her breath. The
extremes to {94} which he will go embarrass her.
Gradually she grows distant from the images of herself, and they take on a life of their own, a life
that, like the marriage, is at times unrecognizable to her. Eventually she is ashamed when her son
discovers the early images on-line. Together Gil and
Irene allow something to grow that satisfies others yet renders the very fabric of their lives
unlivable. To admit that she is the woman in the paintings is
to be a woman she cannot reconcile with the woman, the mother, perhaps even the wife she once
wanted to be. To let her go, for Gil, is not an option
he can survive.
So, Irene writes, not in just one, but two journals. Like a
cracked riverbed, her personality begins to wander in two directions. At first, writing
might seem like a cathartic, healing, personal habit. There are lines in her private journal that
imply writing is magic when shared with an intended
confidant and can be a source of life and connection. But when read by a voyeur, as an artifact, as
evidence in a trial unannounced, writing becomes a
twisted act. While she should be finishing her dissertation on Catlin or tracing any of the many
bits of history she enjoys, Irene writes to manipulate her
audience of one. She considers the world she trusted before the game began as one in which she
recognizes "a failure of imagination on my part" (17).
As she plays the part of Malanchine, translating their marriage on the page, Irene America is
"discovered." And worse yet, she is cast as the same
lustful savage featured in the history books-- this time not by a stranger arriving, but by the
stranger who had been living beside her all along. In many
ways, she writes her own captivity narrative.
As with any story of a bad marriage, there is an exploration
of outcomes. Irene says, "With every person whom I have left, there has always been a
final moment where I have realized I am gone" (49). In Shadow Tag, as the
marriage unravels, events occur that are singular to the victims but too
common in many homes--children are hurt physically and emotionally, parents refuse to get help,
one accuses the other of being depressed and
dysfunctional, endings begin. One persuades the mutual friends to doubt and question the acts of
the other. One decides to follow the other seeking
confirmation of suspicions or thin indications of intent. Eventually the {95} children emerge as characters hiding candy, sneaking wine,
beginning to
comprehend. Riel, the girl named for the Métis hero, decides to become more than she is,
"more than an Indian." She wants to become "a girl of depth,
strength, cunning and truth . . . the kind who could take away the power of another" (62). Young
Stoney finally decides "it's too hard to be a human"
(74). Later, when he tries to understand love and commitment through random public acts and
habits, Erdrich nearly breaks the reader's heart, because
as all adults know, love is not so easily mapped.
The most-cited lines of this book will likely be Irene's
accusation directed both at herself and Gil. She writes to him via the faux diary: "But here is
the most telling thing; you wish to possess me. And here is my mistake: I loved you and let you
think you could" (18). Certainly, she is right. Gil
wanted to own her body, soul, and image. She was the commodity around which his world
revolved. The secret of this book, and of the lives of many
Indians today, is that Irene could have taken back her identity. There is a moment when she
"discards the truth." She recognizes history is made up of
both occurrence and narrative and without narrative an occurrence can be forgotten. This is
something her creator, Louise Erdrich, knows. Erdrich is a
writer whom Anishinaabe author Lois Beardslee would include in the Women's Warrior Society,
the Ogitchidaakwewag.

She is a whirlwind. Maybe a wolf. Maybe a bear, a fish, a snake, maybe just
an idea floating on a soft breeze, a spider in the woodpile. And that
Ogitchidaakwe, she keeps reinventing herself. . . . She studies the leaves in the trees, figures out
the most beneficial time to be a persistent wind.
. . . She studies her environment, looks for opportunity, and changes at will. They all do that,
those women warriors. (Beardslee 19)

Shadow Tag is the story of one more warrior, raised by one more warrior,
raising one more herself. These women, amid the men, need to be noticed.
The men need to be accountable to their own identities, and unions must be strong or they
become dark and dangerous. Although it is not an old-time
oral tale, Shadow Tag is no less a cautionary lesson for those willing to listen. If
only Irene had {96} thought to read her own narrative,
she might have
found the truth: "falling in love is also falling into knowledge" (29).

In The Common Pot Lisa Brooks has begun to do for Native people of the
Northeast, particularly Wabanaki people, a task parallel to what Craig
Womack is doing for Muscogee and other Native nations of the southeastern United States, what
Greg Sarris has been doing for West Coast peoples,
and what the late Paula Gunn Allen did for Pueblo and other (mainly) southwestern people.
Brooks's consideration of early writings in English by
Native people from the Northeast shows a great array of political and intellectual responses to the
pressures of colonization, and it makes visible the
connection between their writing in English and traditional mnemonic representations, like
wampum and maps on birchbark scrolls, used to document
social organization, law, treaties, and people's relationship to land. The core of Native being, for
Brooks, is "the ongoing relationship and responsibility
to land and kin" (xxxii). The act of writing this book proceeds from her sense of responsibility to
the Abenaki people from which she comes; while she
hopes people from her community will want to read the book, a much wider audience will benefit
from the careful research and clear paradigm
informing this text.
Citing Womack in her introduction, Brooks declares her
purpose to bring stories from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings {97} to
contemporary northeastern Native people as a tool for ongoing building of the consciousness of
the people: "These early writings help us to see how
Native nations continued to imagine themselves into being even as they grappled with forces that
threatened to annihilate them. Moreover, these
stories help us to imagine ourselves here, in relation to those that preceded us" (xxxiii).
Brooks provides a number of awikhiganak
(maps) of the Northeast, some taking a broad view from the Gaspee to the Great Lakes, and some
taking a minute view of Kwinitekw (the Connecticut River Valley) or
Shetucket (the Thames River), for example. These maps reflect and respect
Algonkian and Iroquoian historical relationships to and travels over the land, contextualizing
European claims of ownership within a different and
much longer continuum than that supplied by Euroamerican historical narratives of the last three
centuries. Importantly, Brooks uses English names
only rarely on the maps, giving the reader the chance to conceive of places, even those covered
by Euroamerican infrastructures such as the interstate
highways (routes 95, 91, 84, and 395), in Indigenous terms. However, Brooks clearly argues a
view of Native writing as a site of ongoing
reconfiguration of reality. The Common Pot concerns itself with the
critical thought and political agency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mohegan, Mohawk,
Mohican,
Pequot, and Wabanaki writers. Brooks delineates what their written works tell about how the
Native people of the Northeast negotiated, based upon
the teachings of their own cultures, the technologies and ideologies brought by foreign
colonizers; confluences of language, cultural artifacts, and
ideologies of land use (for example) might have resulted in adoption (as English loanwords in
Native languages), adaptation (as writing in English), or
resistance (to encroachment), but Brooks argues that these confluences always incurred acts of
revision informed by the traditions of the Native
cultures. The Common Pot brings a particular focus to
the continuity of writing among Wabanaki and other northeastern Indigenous people as a
precontact
practice. Brooks provides linguistic evidence of this in the Abenaki verb root
awigha, to draw, write, or map, and the {98} noun awikhigan, the tool
resulting from the act of drawing, writing or mapping. She recounts how the
awikhiganak, birchbark scrolls containing symbolic and mnemonic
information, were documented in The Jesuit Relations by seventeenth-century
French priests at Kespek (the Gaspee Peninsula) who discovered their
students creating their own versions of Cliff 's Notes to help remember Catholic prayers and
catechism. Brooks also provides photos of some
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Passamaquoddy and Montagnais examples preserved in
museum collections and argues that the step from creating
these awikhiganak to writing letters and petitions in English was a short and natural
one taken by northeastern Native people, who incorporated
European writing as a tool of resistance and a way to shape the future for their communities from
the eighteenth century forward.
Brooks's chapters move from establishing historical context
to demonstrating the literary analysis of texts that is made possible by a delineation of
Native space in the Northeast. In her first chapter she defines some of her key terms and
documents Native people's use, in an early petition, of the
metaphor of "the common pot" as a way to evoke the dependence of communities, even those in
conflict, on common resources of land. The second
chapter reads some works from the career of Samson Occom in terms of his network of
relationships with various Native communities and his political
work to retain Native lands within New England. In the third chapter Brooks reads the journals of
the Mahican leader Hendrick Aupaumut and the
Mohawk leader Joseph Brant as examples of a "dialectical critique" of the emerging United
States, with which each leader was attempting to create a
peaceful and sovereign relationship. Chapter 4 looks at writing as an instrument of change in
William Apess's Indian Nullification of the
Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Mashpee Tribe. Brooks uses the
example of Apess to show Native people's appropriation of
the language of revolution and independence in the defense of their rights; in chapter 5 she turns
to his Eulogy on King Philip as a culmination of
development in Native writing of this period. The Eulogy, according to Brooks, not
only redefines the wars of the past in terms of Native {99}
sovereignty and courageous defense of homeland and community, but it also defines the present
by locating the frontier of struggle between white
people and people of color, imagining a possible future of peace and freedom for all. The last two
chapters reconsider the development of
genres--letters, petitions, journals, treaty literature, and communal history--and show how these
forms interacted and continue to interact with the oral
(particularly Wabanaki) cultures in this region.
Years ago Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, editor of Wicazo-Sa
Review, told me that most of the Native American studies world knew little about
northeastern Native people; scholars had neglected the field, and much of the writing was out of
print. This work by Lisa Brooks comes in time to
resonate with recent publications in Wabanaki literature and language, notably the
Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary (2008) and Joseph Nicolar's
Life and Traditions of the Red Man (republished in 2007). As a scholar and teacher
living in Maine, working with and teaching about Wabanaki
writing and storytelling, I welcome the scholarship, commitment, and vision informing
The Common Pot as an excellent contribution to the field.

{100}

Contributor
Biographies

MELODY GRAULICH is professor of English and American
studies at Utah State University and the editor of the scholarly journal Western American
Literature. Among many other publications, she co-authored Trading Gazes:
Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans
and edited Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman: Texts and Contexts.

MARGO LUKENS is an associate professor of English at the
University of Maine; her research interests include Native American and mixed-blood
writers; Wabanaki literary and storytelling history; Native American and First Nations plays and
playwrights; innovation and antiracism work. Her
work has included producing and directing Native American plays on campus and in the region,
as well as mentoring Native students and community
members interested in theater. Recently she edited the new UCLA volume Grandchildren
of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories: Five
Plays by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.

MARGARET NOORI received an MFA in creative writing
and a PhD in English and linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently director
of the Comprehensive Studies Program and teaches the Anishinaabe language and American
Indian literature at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor. Her work primarily focuses on the recovery and maintenance of Anishinaabe language
and literature. Her current research interests include
language prociency and assessment and the study of Indigenous literary aesthetics and rhetoric.
For more information or to view current projects, visit
www.ojibwe.net, where she and her colleague, Howard Kimewon, have created space for
language that is shared by academics and the Native
community.

{101}KIRSTI PALTTO is from the Finnish side of Sámiland
and is among the first contemporary Sámi writers. She is also the first Sámi
female writer. Since the
early 1970s, she has written twenty books, of which seventeen have been published thus far. Her
repertoire includes poetry, short stories, children's
books, and novels. She has also written several plays and has been in charge of a local
Sámi theatre in Rávgos.

ROBERT DALE PARKER is the author of The
Invention of Native American Literature and How to Interpret Literature: Critical
Theory for Literary and
Cultural Studies as well as books on William Faulkner and Elizabeth Bishop. He is also
the editor of The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the
Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and Changing Is Not Vanishing: A
Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, to appear in late
2010.

STEVEN SALAITA is associate professor of English at
Virginia Tech and the author of four books, most recently of The Uncultured Wars: Arabs,
Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought.

JONATHAN D. STEIGMAN is currently assistant professor
of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Military Academy. He
has been in his current position since August 2007. Prior to arriving at West Point, he was
assistant professor of Spanish at Mississippi State
University. He published his first book, La Florida del Inca and the Struggle for Social
Equality in Colonial Spanish America, through the University
of Alabama Press in September 2005. He received a PhD in romance languages from the
University of Alabama in August of 2003.

DAVID YOST is a former Peace Corps volunteer and a
current PhD student in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His essays
have also appeared in MELUS and War, Literature, and the Arts,
while his fiction has appeared in Witness, Pleiades,
Mid-American Review, and other
publications.

{102}

Major Tribal Nations
and Bands

This list is provided as a service to those readers interested in further communications with
the tribal communities and governments of American
Indian and Native nations. Inclusion of a government in this list does not imply endorsement of
or by SAIL in any regard, nor does it imply the
enrollment or citizenship status of any writer mentioned. Some communities have alternative
governments and leadership that are not affiliated with
the United States, Canada, or Mexico, while others are not currently recognized by colonial
governments. We have limited the list to those most
relevant to the essays published in this issue; thus, not all bands, towns, or communities of a
particular nation are listed.
We make every effort to provide the most accurate and
up-to-date tribal contact information available, a task that is sometimes quite complicated.
Please send any corrections or suggestions to SAIL Editorial Assistant, Studies in
American Indian Literatures, Department of English, 1 University
Station, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, or send an e-mail to
bryan.russell@mail.utexas.edu.